Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

69 No-ball! side for the return match against the South African tourists, due to begin at the MCG on 3 February. We are accustomed these days to see tourist matches being used to blood some less experienced players; but the eleven selected for this game was by no means an experimental one. Eight of those chosen had played in Victoria’s previous Sheffield Shield match, and a ninth (T.S.Warne) had only missed that match through injury, while a tenth (H.F.Parsons) had been selected for the Shield match but had had to declare himself unavailable. As Miller (match figures none for 84) had not impressed against Queensland, it was perhaps not unreasonable to offer the last place to a debutant who had proved himself in District cricket in recent seasons, and - as the South Melbourne match earlier in January had shown - was in good form with both bat and ball. So Pitcher got the nod. No great fuss was made in the newspapers about his selection, though it was noted in The Argus that he was ‘the first Collingwood player to gain international honours’. On 3 February, Victoria’s captain Warwick Armstrong won the toss and chose to bat. Pitcher joined his captain with the score at 172 for seven and scored what The Argus called a ‘neat’ 18 - including an all-run four from a leg-glance off Bert Vogler - before being yorked by occasional bowler Ormy Pearse’s first delivery of the innings, to make the score 209 for eight. So far, so good. It didn’t last long. After Victoria were finally dismissed for 242, Armstrong asked Pitcher to bowl the first over of the South African innings. Standing at his end was Bob Crockett, already a veteran of 16 Test matches and regarded as Australia’s, and perhaps the world’s, finest umpire. Crockett had secured his reputation as a scourge of suspect bowlers when he no-balled Jack Marsh 19 times across two Sheffield Shield matches in 1900/01, and he immediately left no-one in any doubt about his thoughts on Pitcher’s action. His first three deliveries were all called as no-balls, at which point the bowler modified his action sufficiently to allow his next five deliveries to pass muster. But his ninth delivery was called as a wide, and the tenth once again fell foul of Crockett’s eagle anti-chucking eye. One final legal delivery completed the over; and Armstrong, either taking pity on his debutant or else just not seeing him as a potential wicket-taker, took him off and sent him out to grass. In those days no-balls and wides were not debited against the bowlers’ analyses, and the over - faced by the Test opening pair of Billy Zulch and Louis Stricker - officially only cost him three runs, two of them scored off no-balls. But the cost to Pitcher was far greater; his potential career as a first- class cricketer had surely disappeared before he had bowled a single legal delivery. The Bendigo Advertiser tells us that he ‘showed signs of disappointment at the treatment he had received from the umpire’ (and who wouldn’t?), linking this to his later putting down a catch off Zulch when the batsman had made 16. The Advertiser says the drop came when he was fielding at slip; more plausibly The Age says of the incident that Zulch ‘might have been caught at third man off Kyle, but Pitcher was not on the alert, and the ball went to the boundary’.