Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

31 Chapter Three The Bowler Albert Knight asks if ‘the great bowler, like Minerva from the head of Jove, spring[s] forth full panoplied, intuitively evading scientific reasoning and definite conceptions.’ 56 And promptly answers that he does not. But Knight’s masterly and wondrously written book was published in 1906, the year in which Astill made his début in their county’s very last match of the season. Despite evidence from performances in the Town League, he could not have foreseen the marvellous first full season of the nineteen- year-old in 1907. Nevertheless, Knight does not deny genius: The bowler being human is but clay, to be moulded by the works of his hand and brain, by the time and experience which agglutinate them, but, having the innate gift, he is not bound up with bands of our rules and regulations. A man is either a bowler or he is not a bowler. The inner genius of the art is wholly incommunicable. Two bowlers will bowl with precisely the same action and drop the ball with similar flight on an identical spot. One shall be a good ball necessitating careful play on the batsman’s part, but the other ball shall be instinct with a life and sting which worries a batsman. It is this life and sting from the pitch and the capacity to give a kind of vitality to the ball which characterise the bowling genius. And it is this capacity that the young Astill had in abundance. There is no moving film of Astill bowling and but one distant still photograph of him bowling, which is useful only for showing a follow- through and the placement of his largely off-side field. A photograph of him posing one foot either side of the bowling crease and right arm held high over the wicket is of negligible utility except for showing his grip on the ball. A second shows him far from the wicket at the very edge of the crease. The Cricketer entitled this ‘W.E.Astill … in action’, but despite the presence of an umpire the position, especially of the left arm, indicates that it is once more posed. 57 The single close-up picture known to me of him actually bowling is of very poor quality, being a grainy copy of a photograph in a newspaper in the collection of David Frith. Nobody alive 56 The Complete Cricketer , p 94. 57 29 May 1926, p 69. There are, moreover, no fielders visible behind the bowler, but this, though suggestive, is not conclusive evidence.