Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

35 the umpire. The necessary twisting of his body by nearly 180 degrees to the left from a sideways delivery stride and the position of his right arm would indicate the ‘amount of body’ that he put into the ball and the great sweep of the arm that can, especially for the off break, add so many revolutions per second to those imparted only by movement of the fingers and wrist. Hence at least in part his sting. He was principally an off-break bowler, able to spin the ball acutely ‘even’, according to ‘Crusoe’, ‘on true surfaces, while on a sticky or dusty pitch he was sometimes unplayable’, although late in his career, according to Dawkes, he had lost his bite on easy-paced surfaces. The off break, or ‘break back’ as it was often called, that is ‘the spin … [for a right-handed bowler] from left to right with the axis of the ball vertical’, is ‘the most elementary and in a sense the most natural of breaks, … [achieved] ‘almost entirely by cultivation … [as] with … fingers and wrist the ball is twisted at the moment of delivery … the friction of ball and finger producing rotation’. 67 As far as I can tell, before the Great War his line of attack was largely the classical one of on and just outside the off stump, but in the 1920s, when he increasingly made use of a ‘leg-trap’ (pioneered by the much faster bowler Fred Root, who at one time had been on the Leicestershire ground staff), he fairly often shifted his main line to leg stump until the change in 1935 to the lbw law that required batsman to play at all balls outside the off-stump once more encouraged the off-stump line of attack. 68 Even then, however, F.J.G.Ford could still complain that pad-play is mainly responsible for the faults and weaknesses of modern batting as well as for the excessive drift of bowling from the off to the on, with the two-eyed stance and incessant new ball as contributors: the game has in fact gone a bit legsided not to say ‘cock-eye’. 69 Dawkes remembered Astill as bowling more or less on off stump in the late 1930s with always a short-leg or short square-leg fielder. Catches by the keeper and behind on both sides of the wicket were common, but after the Great War Astill’s victims caught in the cordon of close fielders on the on side became legion. When bowling ‘leg theory’ he usually had five men on the leg side, three in the general region of short leg. An off-break bowler pure and simple can, of course, be played ‘till the cows come home’, as the Leicestershire batsman Bob Gardner once observed to me when I was trying to encourage him to take his bowling more seriously after he had taken three for 54 with off breaks against the New Zealanders at Leicester in 1958. 70 So Astill, like all other such bowlers, was master of the top-spinner, the ball ‘that hurries on’, that is a ball that, while not, of 67 Knight, The Complete Cricketer , pp 110-11. 68 In fact, despite its raison d‘être of stimulating off-side play, it had the opposite effect and was largely instrumental in the decline of the leg break bowler. R.E.S.Wyatt, the England captain at the time and a man who had toured with Astill and was on friendly terms with him (did they ever discuss it?), almost immediately voiced his opposition to the change (he was the only county captain to do so). His opposition remained adamantine even when he was in his nineties in part because it meant that to identical balls a batsman could be out playing back but not playing forward (personal conversation). 69 In a letter to The Times , 15 August 1935. 70 He knew his limitations and did not. The only other two wickets that he took in first-class cricket cost him 145 runs. The Bowler