Lives in Cricket No 42 - Frank and George Mann

26 Army and Navy at Lord’s; and MCC versus the champion county, Yorkshire, at Scarborough. And early in the season, before many of the allied troops stationed overseas were repatriated, 14 he played for Middlesex against the Australian Imperial Forces at Lord’s where the first post-war century was scored by Warner in a fourth-wicket stand of 167 with Hendren. This was achieved with some difficulty as Warner was twice seized by cramp and retired unbeaten on 82, returned at 308 for five and went on to reach 101 before finally having to be carried back into the pavilion. Frank Mann’s own batting record was disappointing as he struggled to develop a stance and style appropriate to his foot-movement restriction, making 547 runs with an average of 21.88. He reached a half-century only twice, 57 against Cambridge University for H.D.G.Leveson Gower’s XI at Eastbourne in the other three-day match, and an unbeaten 61 against Kent at Canterbury, one of his typical fighting innings, going to the wicket at 70 for four and remaining unbeaten on 61 out of 177, but failing to save an innings defeat. He repeated this rearguard action against Kent in the last Championship match of the season at Lord’s but with more success the second time. After going in at 73 for four, with Middlesex still 36 short of avoiding an innings defeat, which would have given Kent the title, he was 20 not out when the game ended with Middlesex 121 for nine. In the field he was no longer able to chase around the outfield, cutting off balls streaking to the boundary or racing to take catches in the deep; he now stationed himself closer to the wicket where Warner praised him for being ‘a very sand-bank at mid-off’, mostly taking hard-driven shots. His anticipation ensured that not much got past him as he moved his long legs one or two steps to the right or to the left. MCC had never agreed with the two-day system used in the Championship and so other games at Lord’s, including Gentlemen v Players and Oxford v Cambridge were played over three days, as usual. The counties realised that their experiment had failed and it was cancelled for the 1920 season and Championship matches returned to three days duration. The title would be decided on a ‘percentage of points’ system, with five points for a win and two points for a first-innings lead in a drawn match. Any games in which there was no first-innings result were ignored. This was going to require even more calculations from statisticians burning the midnight oil, as all the counties had made big increases to their list of fixtures. Some had nearly doubled, like Kent and Warwickshire who went from fourteen to twenty-six, and Middlesex upped their commitment nearly fifty percent by another six matches to a total of twenty. All in all, nine counties played twenty-four matches or more, and the other seven played twenty or less. Now in his forty-seventh year, Warner gave serious thought to retiring, even if it meant never being able to add the title of captain of a Championship-winning county to his many other achievements. He went to see the Middlesex president, A.J.Webbe, to ask if it might not be best for all if he resigned, bearing in mind that a new captain, Frank Mann, was waiting in the wings. Webbe refused point blank and reminded him that 14 Incidentally the officer overseeing this mass discharge was B.F.Burnett- Hitchcock, who had played for Hampshire in 1896. Warner and his ‘Sandbank’