Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

15 knock out your brains with the bat”, in fact I was so excited that I felt more like a madman than a rational being. My first ball was extremely enticing, and, being very eager to hit, I stepped in too far, and, not getting properly hold of the ball, it touched just below the bat handle, and spinning in the air, fell into Shadrach Hunt’s hands, but, oh what a release when I saw it slip through his fingers, hit his breast, and roll on to the ground! From that moment I felt that the game was ours. I called for a glass of brandy, threw up my hat, and kicked it away, and shouted out, ‘Now, Humphrey, do you keep your wicket up, and I’ll whop ‛ em, ’ for I felt invincible. That evening we got 45 runs, and carried out our bats, and the next morning Nottingham won by four wickets, but I shall always believe that if Shadrach Hunt had caught that first ball, the remaining eight men (including Tom Warsop, Leeson, Jefferies and Peter Bramley) would not have got 20 runs and that in point of fact that ball decided the match! According to the Nottingham Review the match was for 80 guineas a side. It was played at Bunny, a large village a few miles south of Nottingham, and lasted four days. Further insight into how the Nottingham Club operated financially is revealed in 1818 when Nottingham played England, when Clarke was a member of the Nottingham team, but is again not credited with a wicket. The match was arranged for £150 a side, in addition to which Nottingham agreed to pay £40 towards the expenses of bringing the England team from London. The organizers of the match were Joe Dennis for Nottingham, and George Osbaldeston Esq for England. The latter was putting up the entire stake money for England. He failed to come to Nottingham as he was with a shooting party in Scotland. The England players could not raise their £75, but agreed on £25 a side. After the match began the England players announced that they could not really even afford the £25 and wished to play purely for honour. This caused problems because the Nottingham stake had been collected from numerous cricket supporters, some individuals giving as little as 3s 6d towards the total. The Nottingham Club felt that the England party had been ‘extremely ill-used by their match-maker’ and gave the England players £30 to pay for their return journey to London. Of course Osbaldeston’s absence could have had something to do with the same fixture the previous season. This match gained notoriety when William Lambert was accused by the Lord’s authorities of selling the game and was thereafter never selected for a match on the Marylebone ground. Nottingham won by 30 runs. It was Clarke’s second match for Nottingham and he scored just a single in his two innings. When interviewed later in life, Clarke maintained that Lambert had been unjustly accused of deliberately performing poorly in order to lose the game. The Nottingham Review after its report and detailed scores of the match continues with: At the conclusion of the first match a second was made for 50 guineas, Tracing Clarke’s Early Life