Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

70 No-ball! Pitcher’s unhappy first day ended with the South Africans on 67 for one, with his own bowling figures standing at 1-0-3-0. Armstrong gave him a second chance the following morning, putting him on at the other end where the bowler’s umpire was W.A.Young, a very experienced local man who had already umpired in ten first-class matches over the preceding ten years, and was to umpire a Test match in the following season (and who moreover had already umpired uncomplainingly in four District Cricket matches in which Pitcher had played). His first five balls passed uneventfully, ‘but he had no length, and Nourse pulled an extra short one to the fence. The sixth ball was wrong, however, and Young promptly called it. The extra ball was again short, and Nourse smacked it to long leg and they ran four. One over was enough, and Pitcher retired … ‘ (The Argus) . His final career figures thus read 2-0-11-0, including five no-balls (two of them scored off) and one wide. Pitcher had become the first Australian to be no-balled for throwing since Marsh in 1901; the first to be called by an umpire other than Bob Crockett since Jim Phillips no-balled Ernest Jones in 1897; and as far as is known, only the second bowler ever to have been no-balled by both umpires in the same first-class match. 46 Bearing in mind that the law now allowed either umpire to call ‘no-ball’ if they were not satisfied as to the fairness of any delivery, it has to be acknowledged that, during the course of his two overs in first-class cricket, he had bowled 12 deliveries that had passed muster with both umpires. Or maybe Crockett felt he had made his point after three balls in Pitcher’s first spell, and allowed all but the most blatant throws to pass, so that his overs might be completed. Whether Young similarly felt that he ought to make his point in the same way - or whether he acted under Crockett’s influence in no-balling him - we can never know. Courtesy of the Bendigo Advertiser we have a brief description of the bowling action that caused Frank Pitcher so much trouble. In explaining his no-balls, the Advertiser remarked that “apparently in making his delivery Pitcher brought his wrist too high, and accompanied his bowling with a jerk”. The Argus adds to our hazy image of his bowling by telling us that he bowled his medium-pacers off a very short run; it also says that, after his first three no-balls, he altered his delivery by lowering his arm, and it was in this style that, for five more deliveries at least, he was able to satisfy Ron Crockett. Whatever adjustments he made, however, it would seem that there was something fundamentally dubious about his bowling action - at least in the eyes of Messrs Crockett and Young. I should record that, later on the second day of the match against the South Africans Pitcher dropped another catch, this time at slip, the batsman being Pegler; and that after a rained-off third day, the match continued to a South African victory by eight wickets on the following day. Pitcher was bowled by Aubrey Faulkner for a duck in his second innings, and unsurprisingly was not called upon to bowl any of the 16 deliveries that the South Africans needed to score the nine runs needed to complete 46 The first had been Captain E.R.C.Bradford, no-balled by both umpires Pickett and White when playing for Hampshire against the Australians at Southampton in 1899.