Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

60 Chapter Six The Batsman and Fielder Fred Root gives Astill as a ‘classic example’, with Rhodes, Hirst, Woolley and others, of ‘cricketers who have to rely almost entirely upon their bowling ability during the earlier stages of their career, later developing into recognized batsmen’. 115 There were, notwithstanding, right from his early days in club cricket indications that Astill ought to be able to bat with some success. In his very first county match as a callow eighteen- year-old a reporter spoke of him making ‘some good strokes’; and similar remarks occurred in succeeding years. Even in 1912, when he averaged only 7.88, ‘Reynard’ could write of him that he ‘played beautifully, placing Hirst to the leg-boundary, and cutting and driving Bayes for splendid fours … No more stylish cricket was seen during the game than Astill’s’ – and that was of a No.11 batsman. The following year when he reached 40 for the first time the same writer observed that he ‘played capital cricket, and with a freedom which fully justifies the good opinions that are held in some quarters of his batsmanship’. Yet prior to the Great War he failed as a batsman with in many years almost unbroken regularity and it is hard to deny F.J.C.Gustard’s assertion that ‘his batting is entirely a post-War product’. 116 His own comment on the situation to his youthful readers in 1925 is: I began to develop into a bat as well as a bowler. Not that I had a great deal of luck in this direction; for though I got pretty near it often enough, I could never just manage for years to get a century. You will see what a time it took me to do it when I tell you that my first century was made against Glamorgan at Swansea in 1921. Was it luck? He had reached 50 only twice before the War, and a mere seven times after before in his 309th attempt he successfully scaled the upper slopes at Swansea. Impetuosity had its part, so too possibly a disinclination to work hard at batting and perhaps also the general expectation of the period that tail-enders made few runs and should anyway save their energy for bowling. Did his games in the Army, when the results hardly mattered in comparison with the enormity of the conflict, grant him the confidence to give free rein to his natural abilities and discover his full range of strokes and the delight that went with producing them? Astill was fundamentally an orthodox batsman, very correct in both defence and attack with a sideways stance that he never altered in his later years as did, with considerable success, his colleague Geary. His primary assets were fast reactions, nimbleness of foot, accurate placement and 115 A Cricket Pro’s Lot , p 102. He strangely includes in his list Astill’s colleague King, of whom this is hardly true (see Littlewood, J.H. King , p 46). 116 The Cricketer , 6 August 1932, p 420.