Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

Later on Eddie Paynter made his cheerful mark, as dynamic in his scintillating fielding as he was explosive in his superb batting. From his hook shot, with both feet sometimes of the ground, to what he called ‘me fancy cuts’, he contrived to accumulate runs quickly yet make high scores, like an express train speeding over lengthy journeys. His visual acuity enabled him to play late to the point of rank unpunctuality – and his impromptu acrobatics enlivened many a dreary hour for his companions, when awaiting trains at Crewe Station. The bowling, importantly for George Duckworth, was first-rate. He now saw Ted McDonald from a more intimate and participative angle. Ted McDonald, having qualified residentially by way of ‘pro-ing’ for Nelson, took over a thousand wickets for Lancashire in nine seasons and reduced the defences of most counties to ungainly tatters. Slim, saturnine, velvety, rhythmic, his speedy exactness had the style and mark of the Florentine assassin in Renaissance Italy. The contrast with his partner, Richard Tyldesley, could not have been wider. Complaining and perspiring and wheezing, either stationary in the slips, where he took over 300 catches, or heaving his corpulent bulk reluctantly over the few steps of what one could scarcely define as a run up, he was the necessary foil. There was much genuflection of arms before the gentle release of the ball, with many an opponent fearing the worst of spin and being fooled by the lack of deviation. Richard Tyldesley would mutter, as another dissatisfied customer was claimed lbw, and with some disdain for normal simile, ‘it were as straight as a whistle.’ By the end of his career, 1,509 dupes had been baffled by his wiles. What a duo! McDonald and Tyldesley – it was like allying Zorro with Fatty Arbuckle. Yet there was one other, whose foreshortened career overlapped a little with Duckworth’s, whose arcane mysteries were even weirder, and that was Cecil Parkin, who, around the base of the innocent off-break, created a bewildering virtuosity of variant deliveries. A conjuror by hobby and, through the medium of his conscious ‘misdirection’ – to deploy an apt magician’s term – the confusing accumulator of probably more overthrows than any other first-class batsman, he was perhaps the only genuine droll that cricket has produced. There have been jokers, some of them unwittingly so, but most have been no more than facetious, causing laughter by right of their fame, where ordinary mortals The Cricket 27