Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

42 The Bowler Rhodes’. Wyatt continued to say that, although his spin was quite easy to pick, his flight could be tricky because he put spin on the ball at times that made it dip and pitch shorter than was anticipated, as Grimmett regularly did ‘making it dip into the toes almost’. Throughout Astill’s career reports advert to feeble strokes made by batsmen as good as George Gunn in gently returning the ball to the bowler. He caught 116 batsmen off his own bowling, although some catches were admittedly taken off full-bodied drives when the flight was only marginally misjudged. The number of players caught on the boundary between deep mid wicket and deep cover, especially at long on and long off, is testament to not only the style of play of his time but also his teasing and deceptive flight, his minute, probing variations of pitch and his unexpected changes of speed, sometimes imperceptible and sometimes startlingly great. Philip Snow remembered that even in the late 1930s he still appeared ‘to make the ball drift, float, dip, hang, swerve and suddenly drop (not, of course, all at the same time, though on occasion as I batted against him in the nets it seemed as such)’. He may safely be classed as an all-round bowler, for the variations of speed, spin and swerve already mentioned enabled him to put up remarkable performances on many different types of wicket, slow, fast, wet, dry, soft and sometimes even hard, although he was naturally most lethal on broken wickets and those made fast and unpredictable by a drying sun. In general he preferred worn and dusty or wet wickets for his spin to grip. His advocacy of matting wickets in England at those times when the weather precludes the preparation of good grass pitches was activated by a desire for better, and more, cricket rather than an aid to his own style of bowling. 88 He operated effectively whatever the age and condition of the ball, although he probably preferred one that was new: indeed in some seasons he was a regular opening bowler, combining with fast bowlers like Jayes and Skelding, fast-medium like Geary and Benskin or a fellow- spinner like King. And as an opening bowler at the outset of an innings, when batsman and bowler should especially be engaged in ‘combat à l’outrance’, he never played his opponent in with purely accurate and defensive bowling. If a batsman’s scoring on unresponsive pitches was at these times often slow, it was because Astill’s guileful use of variation kept him puzzled and intent on simply keeping up his wicket. One last quality stood him in good stead. Whereas that wondrous wizard of the spinning ball ‘Tich’ Freeman could turn ‘the best county batsmen … from men to sheep … winnow[ing] the faint-hearted like chaff’, yet when the élite few, for whom he held no terrors, ‘batted him off the pitch’ Freeman,‘once struck down … did not re-arise. He retired to cover-point, shrugging his whole body,’ as a contemporary wrote. 89 His standard dispirited reaction was to eschew flight in favour of flat and unthreatening deliveries. Such was not Ewart Astill’s attitude: under attack he persevered, 88 On the other hand, his colleague Geary, who was almost unplayable on South African matting, would have been a real beneficiary of their introduction. 89 Robertson-Glasgow, Further Cricket Prints , pp 51-52. It is only fair to note that this was not the opinion of the cricket historian David Lemmon, who believed that only Duleepsinhji and perhaps O’Connor truly had the mastery over him ( ‘Tich’ Freeman and the Decline of the Leg-Break Bowler , pp 69, 100, 130).