Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

47 defeat of the season for the ‘Hoppers’. At the fall of the eighth wicket in the second innings, however, ‘matters were going very badly when [Astill and Shipman] came together, and pluck was needed. Plenty was shown. There are many batsmen in the team who could envy Astill’s nerve … Both the young men played cricket and knew where the ball was going.’ Astill’s driving on both sides of the wicket was particularly commended. Kent were left needing 291 to win, and ‘in view of the strength and brilliant character of [their] batting, and of the fact that the pitch was still fast and true, this could not’, The Times correspondent pronounced, ‘be considered a very hard task, but it proved beyond their powers’, as the last five wickets, three to Astill, added but 18 runs after tea. The return match took place a few days later at Tonbridge. Although it resulted in a bad loss for his side, Astill, while making negligible contributions with the bat, took the prized wickets of K.L.Hutchings, Woolley and Hardinge, keeping his length after early heavy punishment. Twelve Derbyshire batsmen fell to him in two consecutive games, but Derbyshire, though winning both, were very poor this season. In the second innings of the home match Jayes and Astill bowled unchanged in dismissing the visitors for 137, with the latter bowling primarily leg breaks. Ten days later, on a pitch at Aylestone Road periodically recovering and made worse by rain, a meritorious first innings of 333 by his county was sufficient to bring victory against neighbouring Warwickshire. Astill opened the bowling tidily at the beginning of the visitors’ first attempt, but his captain did not deem his performance sufficiently penetrating to give him the same rôle in the follow-on. After lunch on the third day, however, with the opposition still 115 behind, Hazlerigg gave him the ball. In 11.4 overs he had won the match with five wickets for eight runs, emphatically recalling the sting of his former days. Warwickshire, however, were another poor county this year, as indicated by their destroyer’s inability to take more than 15 wickets in Leicestershire’s remaining seven matches in which his season’s average went four runs to the worse. One of these matches, however, must be mentioned as it was Ratby’s greatest triumph. Leicestershire had never defeated Yorkshire in a Championship match 100 at the time of the Tykes’ arrival at Aylestone Road, but to everyone’s astonishment the feared visitors now lost by the enormous margin of 259 runs. Although Astill took only three wickets (three for 13 and none for 18), he, his uncle Jayes and their Ratby confrère Bill Shipman took the first 18 Yorkshire wickets before captain Shields stepped in to prevent possible hubris on the part of the villagers by introducing R.T.Turner, a youth born in Leicester and better known for his footballing skills, 101 who took the remaining two wickets for two runs in seven balls. Even in batting the Ratby trio 102 made their mark in scoring 78 runs − Jayes 38, Shipman 31 and Astill nine without being dismissed. Leicestershire fell in 1911 to last but one in the Championship table. 100 The match in 1894, though first-class, was not part of the Championship. 101 He played for Leicester Fosse, an earlier incarnation of Leicester City. 102 More specifically, the Berry’s Lane trio, for in Astill’s boyhood they had lived there within six doors of each other. Next Year, Sometime, Never