Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

40 The Bowler to keep an immaculate length even against aggressive opponents, an immaculate length that he was intelligent enough to vary in accord with the state and speed of the wicket and the height and playing style of the batsman. This length he rarely had to discover, bowling it from the first ball of a new spell. On numerous occasions he put an immediate brake on the rate of scoring when he entered the fray and conceded fewer runs than he bowled overs, and on a helpful wicket batsmen could do little other than defend. As late as 1934 the correspondent of The Times remarked that ‘until the batsman makes up his mind to take his life in his hands, [Astill] will always keep the runs down’. 81 In all his thirty seasons there was not one in which his economy rate reached three runs an over. The average for his entire career is 2.49 runs per six-ball over, an average that would be somewhat lower but for one hitherto unmentioned aspect of his bowling, one which he developed largely in the later 1920s. On ‘shirt-fronts’, and when no bowler seemed able to discommode a batsman whether scoring freely or not, Astill resorted to temptation. 82 A long list of batsmen fell into the trap, jolted out of their rhythm or complacency. Some smote him for six (few if any bowlers were hit for more sixes than Astill), but, like Jack Walsh for the county later, he cheerfully tossed up another tempting delivery to which they not infrequently succumbed. Whether or not he had read Conan Doyle’s story of Tom Spedegue, the asthmatic teacher with a weak heart who won a deciding Ashes Test for England, I do not know, 83 but in the late 1920s he certainly 81 7 May. Later that year (16 June) the correspondent of the Leicester Sports Mercury made the different but complementary comment that ‘there is no more dangerous bowler than Astill when batsmen are showing a lack of restraint’. 82 On the basis of his handwriting the graphologist Bob Malloney pronounced him ‘a great strategist’. 83 Conan Doyle’s ‘The Story of Spedegue’s Dropper’ was published in October, 1928, in The Strand Magazine and was clearly inspired by a personal experience about which he had written in 1909: ‘I have only once felt smaller, and that was when I was bowled by A.P.Lucas, by the most singular ball that I have ever received. He propelled it like a quoit into the air to a height of at least thirty feet, and it fell straight and true on to the top of the bails. I have often wondered what a good batsman would have made of that ball. To play it one would have needed to turn the blade of the bat straight up, and could hardly fail to give a chance. I tried to cut it off my stumps, with the result that I knocked down my wicket and broke my bat, while the ball fell in the midst of this general chaos. I spent the rest of the day wondering gloomily what I ought to have done − and I am wondering yet.’ ( ibid , 38.225, pp 270-81). Nearly three decades earlier, however, A.G.Steel had recommended it seriously: ‘It should be delivered as high as possible; there is no limit to the height this ball may go in the air, as the higher it ascends the more difficult it is to play. It should be bowled so that it reaches its highest point when it is almost directly over the head of the batsman and should pitch on the very top of the stumps. It is strange that this ball is not more often practised by slow bowlers, as, especially to the pokey, nervous style of batsman, it is fraught with considerable uneasiness and requires some skill to play properly.’ The whole discussion of this ball is accompanied by a woodcut (from a photograph) of such ‘a pokey batsman dealing with a high-dropping full-pitch’ (A.G.Steel and Hon R.H.Lyttelton, Cricket , Second Edition, London, 1888, pp 142-144). This could conceivably have given Astill the idea (he may have been experimenting with such a ball before 1928, and we cannot eliminate the possibility that a man so fascinated by variations was trying out possibilities completely independently). The later Leicestershire captain C.H.Palmer, however, who with such balls in the 1950s aroused the excitement and hilarity of the crowd and bemused some famous victims, was consciously following the example of Tom Spedegue (private conversation).