Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

40 Never a run Bay v New South Wales in 1893/94 - and has the unique distinction of recording his two ducks on different grounds. The first day of the match was played at the Recreation Ground in Napier, but they all had to move to nearby Farndon Park for the second and final day, because of a prior booking for ‘Caledonian sports’ at the Recreation Ground. The only other cricketer known to have registered a king pair in his only first-class match was Sajith Kumara , playing for Rio Sports Club v the Sri Lanka Air Force SC at Colombo in 2001/02. There may well be several others who achieved this sad feat, but details of the number of balls faced by most of the candidates are not recorded. Bertram Ross must have been proud to captain the Leeward Islands side in their first recognised first-class match, against Jamaica at Kingston in July 1958; but batting at number four in both innings, he never broke his duck. Two of the Dera Ismail Khan team who were massacred by an innings and 851 runs by Railways at Lahore in 1964/65 registered ‘only-match pairs’ in this game. One was bowler Inayatullah , whose unhappy match, and career, were completed with bowling figures of one for 279 to go with his pair. The other was opening batsman Taimur Hasan , whose other distinction in this game was that he bowled two overs (for 12 runs) in Railways’ innings of 910 for six declared. These two overs apart, all the bowling in the long Railways’ innings was shared between just four bowlers. Finally, I’ve promised myself to include somewhere in this volume something about the career of the cricketing one-match wonder and footballing three-goal hero, Geoff Hurst - and this seems a good place. In his only first-class match, for Essex v Lancashire at Liverpool in 1962, Hurst took the place of all-rounder Barry Knight, who was on Test duty (as 12th man) at Edgbaston. He batted twice without scoring a run, but he didn’t register a pair, as he was left 0 not-out in his first innings, before being dismissed for 0 in his second. He was, needless to say, a very competent cricketer. In 23 matches for Essex in the Second Eleven Championship between 1962 and 1964 he scored 797 runs at an average a shade over 20, with four half-centuries and a highest score of 61. He was also an occasional wicketkeeper, and in all he made 15 catches and five stumpings in those 23 matches, though he did not keep wicket in his only first-class game. There, that’s a promise kept.