Lives in Cricket No 38 - Lionel Robinson

39 Putting Old Buckenham on the cricketing map superb first-slip, noted for his powers of anticipation and his ability to use either hand. Importantly, although well aware that he was past his prime for cricket at the highest level, he was still able to contribute significantly as a batsman to the teams that he captained for Robinson. Perhaps trading on his reputation as a Test cricketer, he was also able to put himself on to bowl for Robinson’s sides on many occasions with much more success than a first-class bowling average of 267.00 would suggest. At least once, in 1913, he even took on the role of wicketkeeper. Archie’s captaincy famously received rave reviews from Neville Cardus but rather more dispassionate observers have pointed out that a record in Ashes Tests of four wins and 11 losses in 22 games is not one would expect of a truly great skipper and many revisionist historians have levelled accusations of poor man-management against him. Evidence of an unhelpful streak of pessimism has been cited; for example, when shown the side chosen for the Old Trafford Test of 1902 he was quoted as saying: ‘My God, Jacker [Sir Stanley Jackson], look what they’ve sent me. Do they think I am playing the blind asylum?’ Furthermore, although he could be a shrewd judge of the game, he also had ‘moments of madness’ when his grasps of selection and tactics seemed far from sure. Archie has been portrayed as possessing an experienced cricket brain that was capable of instinctive brilliance, but being cursed with a capricious streak which could make him his own worst enemy. Critical spectators at home Tests were known to find that his placing of the field and his changing of the bowling were sometimes ‘eccentric and misguided’. To be fair to Archie, Michael Down thinks that the critics have been far too harsh, blaming selectorial errors attributed to his subject on the selectors who, the author claims, over-ruled their captain. He also states that ‘there has always been unanimous agreement that [Archie] had no peer when it came to tactical matters’, with the one exception that he was loathe to take off a successful, but tiring, bowler in favour of a fresh change bowler. That exception could prove costly; on the Ashes Tour of 1901-2 the over-bowling of Sydney Barnes undoubtedly contributed to his breakdown while refusal to remove ‘Daddy’ Carr from the attack during the Oval Test in 1909 is frequently cited as an archetypal piece of misjudgement. However, Archie certainly had the bearings of a Test skipper, it being said that he was: ‘one of the most commanding cricketers ... whether doing well or not so well’, that: ‘from his position at first slip...his gesture was regal’ and that he had ‘lofty self-assurance ... [and an] imperious attitude’. He could, though, show a common touch; Malies reveals that: ‘At a time when Lord Harris and Lord Hawke were treating professionals as though they had communicable diseases, nothing gave Archie more pleasure than skipping down the pavilion steps with his arm round Johnny Tyldesley.’ What is undeniably to his credit is that he discovered Sydney Barnes, arguably the finest bowler that the Test game has ever seen, plucking him from almost complete obscurity to go on an Ashes tour. Unfortunately though, he seems to have got things wrong rather too often. Malies states, somewhat ambivalently: ‘The subject is a farrago, an extraordinary mass