Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

111 match. There was a break of a month before Foster’s return fixture with Worcestershire, to be played at New Road beginning on 15 August. Three of the four players who had defected to his eleven from Worcestershire for the AIF match returned to the county side for this game, and for a variety of reasons four of the others selected for the AIF match did not play in the return. This meant that seven changes were needed to the side that had played against the AIF. An obvious first choice might have been to re-instate the five who had already played against Worcestershire but not against the AIF, but in the end only two of those five - one of them Chase Meredith - played in both games. 85 So five newcomers were needed. Foster’s side had beaten Worcestershire by four wickets in their meeting at Hereford, so to avoid discouraging his own county further he probably wasn’t looking to make his team any stronger. In the event, all five were players who also represented Herefordshire in that 1919 season - as did the six (including Foster himself) who remained from the first game against Worcestershire. So the entire XI was made up of players from the Herefordshire club, and a case could be argued that the side might better have been known as ‘H.K.Foster’s Herefordshire eleven’, or else simply as ‘Herefordshire’. If a match were to be arranged today between such a side and a side of the poor quality of Worcestershire’s 1919 eleven, I strongly doubt that first-class status would even be contemplated for it. But rightly or wrongly the match at New Road has come to be accepted as a first-class game, and so all those who took part in it are now established as first-class cricketers. And one of them was Alfred Green-Price. Had the match been played on a similar basis in a season before the War, there is no doubt that his selection for Foster’s team would have been fully justified, whatever his age. But by 1919, aged 59 and after a five-year lay-off, his powers were clearly waning. Over the season as a whole he made only 59 runs in six innings for Herefordshire, with a highest score of 36 - though at least that was made only a fortnight before the match at New Road, and during that fortnight he had also played an innings of 43 for the Gentlemen of Radnorshire against Birmingham’s Pickwick club. So whether for sentimental reasons, for reasons of neighbourliness and a wider personal friendship (though Foster had left Tarrington, and Foley’s employment, by this time), or for genuine cricketing reasons - and I suspect it was a smattering of all three - Alfred got his chance in a first-class match. The game gets no special attention in Alfred’s scrap-book, over and above that given to many of his matches at this time. It seems that to those concerned it was in everything but name ‘just another Herefordshire CC match’ - and indeed it is listed as such in the club’s review of the 1919 season. It also got no special attention in the local press. The course of the match may be swiftly summarised. On the first day (and 85 The other three players who played in the first game against Worcestershire but not the second - S.Bishop, H.J.Dent and P.G.James - played no other first- class cricket beyond that one match for H.K.Foster’s XI. The oldest of them all