Lives in Cricket No 32 - Eric Rowan

12 described how his father would bowl underhand to him, all the while encouraging him to watch the ball, move his feet and play with a straight bat. In his younger days Alf Rowan was a good club cricketer and athlete, but rugby was his game. He played centre 29 times for Transvaal and was in with a strong chance of playing for South Africa until he broke his collarbone during a series of trial games for national selection. Late in his life Alf came to live with Eric and his family, dying at home in his sleep at the age of 83. Eric’s cricketing breakthrough came in the following summer. In 1931/32 the South African team toured Australia and New Zealand, and, while this took the best players out of the Currie Cup, it left places open for youngsters like Eric. After two quiet matches he made the breakthrough against Natal at the Old Wanderers in Johannesburg. Opening the innings, he shared a second-wicket partnership of 187 with former Springbok batsman Fred Susskind. After they were separated Eric went on to dominate the innings of 420 before he was finally dismissed for 185. He went agonisingly close to making it a hundred in each innings when he was bowled for 99 in the second. Just one more run and he would have been the first to score a century in each innings of a Currie Cup match. By the season’s end he had scored 521 runs at the good average of 47.36. Eric’s form had been enough to hold his place in the Transvaal side for the start of the following season when the Test players were once again available. The Currie Cup was not competed for in 1932/33, a strange decision given that there was no touring team in the country that summer which was the usual reason for such a decision . Apparently it was decided that the tournament in 1932/33 should be less intensive than in the previous season in order to make fewer demands on South Africa’s part-time cricketers. It seemed to have little effect on those players who had toured Australia and New Zealand in 1932/33 as only six of them – Curnow, Brown, Steyn, Dalton, Viljoen and Balaskas - appeared at all during the summer. The decision resulted in Eric playing just three first-class games, all of them at Cape Town where a tournament was held in lieu of the Currie Cup. After failing in the first match he was left out of the side which played The Rest at Green Point. Recalled for the game against Natal he scored 103, adding 205 for the first wicket with Sid Curnow, followed by 63 in the second innings of a drawn game. His only other appearance was for the North against the South and a failure there contributed to his missing Transvaal’s Growing Up