Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

63 The Batsman and Fielder principally played off the back foot as a sort of gentle dab down between third slip and gully [with the bat coming] down on top of the ball’. This was, therefore, seemingly the antithesis of the ugly poke with a straightish bat to send the ball in the same direction and unlike the cut with an horizontal bat played late. Old habitués of Grace Road can perhaps visualize him for this particular stroke as an earlier Vic Jackson. 119 His leg-side strokes were the on drive, the pull along the ground and the leg glance, which last he played with delicacy. A further, and poor, photograph entitled ‘A leg stroke by Ewart Astill’ appeared in the Sports Mercury of 1 May 1926. The right foot of a much bent leg is off the ground except for the tip of the toe well behind the popping crease, while the left is grounded about two feet in front outside leg stump and facing slightly to the onside. The bat is at an angle of about 60 degrees above the horizontal, the body twisted round, eyes on the ball hit away fairly fine on the leg side. This, then, we may assume, shows the conclusion of a pull played very late. All his strokes, both defensive and offensive and even when he had advanced down the wicket, were played with an appearance and often reality of lateness, the mark of so many a good batsman. Although not extremely fast between the wickets, especially in his later years, he was a very good judge of a run. A failure to make his ground accounted for 3.20% of his dismissals, a fairly common percentage for the period. Why, then, did he not enjoy greater success? Before an attempt is made to answer that question it should be observed that for the years 1921 to 1931, when he was at the height of his powers, he averaged around 28, which translated to modern conditions would have approached 40, a very respectable average for an all-rounder. There are probably various answers to the question. First, he did not have outstanding natural talent as a batsman. Second, he was overworked. Over the period mentioned he regularly bowled well over 1,000 overs a season as he was initially the principal member of his county’s attack and then for most of the 1920s and into the early 1930s formed together with Geary a feared attacking force. For some years he opened the bowling, and on good wickets would be called upon to check the speed of scoring before being requested to puzzle the tailenders into submission. Many all-rounders bowled a great deal, but few opened the bowling and far fewer opened the batting also, a rôle he often, and in some years regularly, filled. 120 Moreover, being a quintessentially team-player, he often lost his wicket in a necessary quest for fast runs. The third reason is that he had a failing against really fast 119 Cf. also the photographs of Ranjitsinhji and Arthur Shrewsbury performing the stroke in the former’s The Jubilee Book of Cricket of 1897, opposite pp 164 and 190 respectively. 120 Over his whole career he batted legitimately (i.e. apart from incidental promotions as nightwatchman) from No. 1 to No. 11. During his heyday as a batsman he appeared less often as an opener than at No. 3, but with his county’s parlous batting that latter position was often tantamount to opening. It must be said that the batting order used to be far more fluid then than it is today when a batsman going in at, say, third wicket down instead of second may be a topic for apparently anguished discussion and subsequent analysis by reporters.