Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

43 resorting to attempted containment in the hope of impatient error on the part of the batsman, and, if that failed, to a teasing mixture of unexpected deliveries. And he was not without success: George Gunn and Philip Mead each fell to him 14 times, Herbert Sutcliffe ten, Jack Hobbs eight and Walter Hammond seven. Cowdrey concluded that ‘Astill had a wonderful ability to bowl everything, and he was far from being a mere “Jack-of-all-Trades and Master of None”; he was deft, he could do anything with the ball’. Levett said ‘He bowled all sorts of balls, off breaks, leg breaks, googlies, inswingers, outswingers … he could bowl upside down if you asked him to’. Dawkes summed up his repertoire with the words ‘Ewart tried everything, quite frankly: you never knew quite what he was going to bowl … He mixed them up, he never bowled the same ball twice, he liked a variety of balls … he bowled Liquorice Allsorts’. 90 And as for the bowler himself, on one occasion when he bowled a wide in the air he remarked ‘I’ll try anything once’. 91 This armoury of spin, angle, flight, length, variations of speed, love of experimentation and resilience in the face of adversity was augmented by his analysis of a batsman’s strengths and weaknesses: in Hopper Levett’s words, ‘he used his loaf, if you see what I mean, as a bowler’. No wonder that umpires answered his rather high-pitched appeals with a raised fore- finger on 2,432 occasions. Indeed, one may wonder why that number was not even greater. He had perhaps two faults, as ‘Crusoe’ observed. One was his inability to conceal whether he was turning the ball from leg or off. The other is indicated by his appeals, which though competitive, were yet excited and happy cries rather than aggressive snarls. In ‘Crusoe’s’ words he lacked the ‘fervida animi vis’, 92 or what today in less erudite language would be called the ‘killer-instinct’. 90 Dawkes did not, however, remember him ever employing back spin. 91 According to a letter of appreciation by the Rev Cyril Horspool written to a local newspaper, almost certainly the Leicester Mercury or Leicester Evening Mail . Grace Briggs showed me merely a cutting. Especially towards the end of his career phrases like ‘a typical Astill assortment’ appear in the Leicester newspapers. 92 This expression is probably a misremembrance or conscious variation of Lucretius’ ‘vivida animi vis’ ( De Rerum Natura 1.72). The Bowler