Lives in Cricket No 39 - Alec Watson

75 nor of course had Watson. This was a factor that seemed to rankle with certain counties, such as Nottinghamshire, who were keen to emphasise that their side was a largely home-grown one; Crossland had in fact been born in that county. The dispute had simmered on through the first half of the 1880s. There had been crowd demonstrations in Kent, and at The Oval and Trent Bridge about Lancashire’s bowling, particularly that of Crossland. Though Nash was also successful and the target of criticism, he was certainly a slower and less hostile bowler than Crossland, and there may have been genuine fear of physical injury felt in the case of some of the latter’s opponents. Also in Crossland’s case his bowling action appears to have been more obviously suspect. While some of the crowd hostility may have been down to the mob instinct, it would seem that his bowling action was visibly dubious. Again, during this controversy, Watson seems not to have been named as having a suspect action. When the laws of the game, which had largely stood unaltered since 1864, were put forward in 1884 for revision by MCC, Lord Harris proposed that Law X should read: ‘The ball must be fairly bowled, not thrown or jerked, and if the umpire be of the opinion that the delivery is not absolutely fair he must call “No Ball”.’ However, MCC simply called on umpires to enforce the current law properly. The umpires were looking to MCC to take a stand, but in his biography of Lord Harris J.D.Coldham wrote that when Harris asked Bob Thoms (an umpire whose contributions to Wisden show him to be a less reticent member of his profession) to look out for an alleged thrower, Thoms replied, ‘We umpires are going to do nothing. It is you gentlemen who are going to have to do it.’ Coldham added that, though cricket was flourishing, its organisation, ‘especially relating to law-making, was creaking loudly’. Some circumvented the laws, others were ostrich-like, while Harris believed that, when cricketers became slack about the laws, ‘the game itself would be the loser’. Hence there were demands that the umpires should take action against those concerned, but they did not do so. The perceived wisdom was that they did not wish to jeopardise the career of a professional cricketer, a career that many of them had pursued. That may have been the case, but there is little evidence that any one of them made such a conscious decision. In any case they did not take action against suspect amateur bowlers either, C.B. Fry being a case in point some years later; no action was taken against his apparently obvious throw until the general clamour brought Chucker?