Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

57 In the event his total number of runs, 754, and average, 19.33, though a vast improvement on anything that he had achieved before, could be considered a disappointment; and once more his value was more as a bowler, with 97 wickets at 20.39. He, King (with 100 wickets at the age of 49) and Benskin were responsible for their county’s respectable average of 31.81% of the points available in the Championship, well above the bottom three clubs, of which Derbyshire failed to gain a single point. That Leicestershire, despite winning as many as seven games, came only 13th in the table was owing to lamentable batting with only Coe and Mounteney of the regular players scraping an average above 20. As Wisden reported the following year, Leicestershire was an unusual county at this time in that the bowling was far stronger than the batting. 113 His captain percipiently still deemed him more the bowler, for in the first match, on a treacherous pitch at Leicester against Hampshire, he batted as low as No.7 (and failed twice), but together with King was entrusted with the new ball. Although he initially failed to take a wicket as the opposition was dismissed for a mere 77, he proved his worth in the second innings with a return of five for 32 to ensure an emphatic victory. The next encounter, at Old Trafford, was the first in which Astill could really claim to be taken seriously as an all-rounder. He contributed seven wickets (five in the second innings, flighting the ball against the wind) to the opening spin bowlers’ eighteen in the match, top-scored with a defensive 22 not out in 70 minutes in Leicestershire’s paltry first effort of 64 and then added a further undefeated 29, which though not staving off defeat did at least extend the match by six minutes into a third day when ‘apart from those who had business on the ground there were [but] two spectators’. By the time of the fourth match, against the ‘Cobblers’, ‘Astill finds himself considerably promoted [to No.4] … recognition of much steady batting this season’. He justified this exalted position with an innings of 38, a seemingly trivial amount but over a third of his county’s total and graced with ‘two fine hits to leg’, ‘crisp strokes on the off-side’ and ‘two sterling drives’. His batting was beginning not only to produce a few valuable runs but also give aesthetic pleasure. Perhaps stung by his immediate and strange demotion to No.8 he produced the second-highest scores in both innings against Kent, in the first hitting Fairservice for two sixes, dispatching Woolley’s first two balls after lunch to the square-leg boundary and cutting Freeman for a further boundary. In addition he took a further six wickets, ‘tucking the batsmen up considerably’. Promoted again (to No.3 now) for the second innings against Lancashire and the following game against Surrey he failed completely and dropped four places in the order to face Sussex, only to find his 70 not out push him up to open with Whitehead against the ‘Lacemen’ in the following game. For the rest of the season he moved up and down the order, his highest innings in this period being 63 at Hove and 52 at The Oval where with remarkable resource on the leg side ‘he punished Fender as the Surrey 113 This situation continued for most of the inter-war period, despite what The Cricketer saw as a general decline in bowling (17 May 1930, p 81). The New Man