Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

37 leg-break bowler’. On occasions it was his off break that was the successful ball through its sheer unexpectedness. Nevertheless ‘Crusoe’ claimed that he was never master of the ball that leaves the batsman from leg to off; but had he really seen enough of him, given that Leicestershire and Somerset met only a few times during ‘Crusoe’s’ career? The sharp bite of his early bowling successes seems to have sufficed at first, but as the years went on he tried more and more spinning variations, something that came naturally to a man fascinated by the tricks possible with a billiard ball. One was the over-spun leg break, a ball ‘liable to dip late in its flight, sometimes giving the impression of being a half volley and turning out to be a good length delivery’. 74 ‘Crusoe’ writes that ‘when the fancy took him, he could send down a somewhat self-evident googly’, 75 but at least in later years this was no occasional delivery. Dawkes recalled that his general ball was the ‘off-spinner’, and he would mix [this] by bowling a leg-spinner, but mainly his other ball was a googly … which would suit his field-placing’. Fellow-wicketkeeper ‘Hopper’ Levett corroborated Dawkes in speaking of Astill’s googly, whereas Philip Snow, claiming that ‘top spin was his variation from the off-break – supplemented by a leg-break – in the composition of the over’, denied that he ever saw him bowl a googly (as did Gerry Lester), while his elder brother, the Leicestershire cricket historian Eric, told me that Astill bowled the odd googly only ‘as a bit of fun’. Bob Wyatt, who often batted against him in both his heyday and his twilight, said that he never saw him attempt a googly or even discuss it. However much or little the ever-experimenting Astill used the googly, he would have been appalled by A.C.MacLaren’s publicly expressed hope, in an article on the googly’s deleterious effect upon batsmanship, that ‘the day will come when the bowler will be no-balled whenever he sends down an illegitimate break’. Shades of Plato’s castigation of musical innovation as ‘unmusical illegality’! 76 To spin Astill added swerve. As early as 1910 The Times correspondent observed that ‘nearly every fast-to-medium right-handed bowler in these days can swerve from leg, but Astill seems to have also that ball which, delivered with the arm right over the head, swerves from the off’. Wyatt remembered that his inswinger ‘brought you too much in line, and that is why he got quite a number of lbws because the ball started outside the off stump and then at the last moment the ball dipped in and then straightened’. 136 of his victims were despatched lbw, 12.98% of his total. In Dawkes’ time he no longer bowled in-swingers, 77 but ‘he bowled’, at the same pace as most other balls, ‘a nice little away-swinger’ with no alteration of action ‘because he was sideways on, so he would swing the ball away automatically, and then, being an off-spinner, he would turn the ball back’. Wyatt added to this by saying that Astill could ‘make the ball float away although it was an offspinner by dropping his wrist, and 74 Description by T.E.Bailey. 75 Further Cricket Prints , p 53. 76 The Cricketer , 2 July 1921, p 4; Plato in Laws 700A-701B. 77 He had not, however, lost the skill, for Cowdrey recalled him bowling both in- and away-swingers in the nets in 1946. The Bowler