Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

21 So close to reach 275 for six when the match came to its conclusion. By far the biggest individual innings in Victoria’s total was the 162 recorded by Bill Ponsford, playing in only his second first-class match and batting at number eight. The contemporary newspaper reporters tell us plenty about his knock, but very little about Rimington’s. Coming in at number six, Rimington had helped to move the score from 163 for four to 320 for seven, sharing stands of 79 for the sixth wicket with fellow-one-match- wonder Hacken Dummett (43), and 64 for the seventh with Ponsford. The newspaper reports suggest that his innings - all of it on the first day of the match - lasted a little over two hours, but they are light on any other details; unusually for reports at the time, they don’t even tell us how many boundaries he hit. The closest approaches to a description of the innings come from the Hobart paper The Mercury , which described it initially as “a sparkling display … a sterling innings, compiled from strokes on all sides of the wicket”. Such blandness makes one wonder if the reporter was even there - maybe he was just guessing?; for ten days later the same paper gives us something a bit meatier, though less effusive: “Rimington was more solid and less a stylist than most of the other batsmen and put together a good 91. He was a bit uppish in some of his strokes on the off [side]”. There is no description of how he lost his wicket when he had reached 91, though the scorecard tells us he was caught behind off the bowling of Frederick Toby, another one-matcher, whose bowling style is not recorded. Nor do we have any idea of how he batted as he approached his century - did he show apprehension, or did he perhaps succumb through too much bravado? Rimington also bowled a few overs in each of the Tasmanian innings, without taking a wicket, to give himself career figures of 8-0-57-0 (eight- ball overs). The Mercury tells us that “as a bowler [he] comes both ways, but does not keep the length of Grimmett.” (Ah yes - Clarrie Grimmett was also playing, in his third first-class match Stanley Rimington – finally out for 99.