Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

72 umpires. Perhaps they will be less timorous after being given a lead by the man who is recognised as being at least as good an umpire at the present time as any in the world.’ 48 Some hope. In his next match for Collingwood - umpired by two men who eventually stood in 16 Tests between them, William Hannah and David Elder - Pitcher once again bowled without challenge; and indeed he was never ‘called’ in District cricket either before or after his one and only first-class match. He never again reached the heights of wicket-taking that he had achieved in 1909/10, but 28 wickets in 1910/11 and 25 in 1912/13 were testament enough to his continuing effectiveness at club level. In the latter season he helped Collingwood to their first-ever championship title in District cricket; they did not win another until the 1970s. Although he did not take a wicket in the final against Fitzroy, he took three catches at silly point to give the lie to any suggestions that he was not, in normal circumstances, a safe fielder. His final two seasons brought him 16 and 19 wickets respectively, the latter including his career-best innings return of seven for 21 against North Melbourne in October 1913. When he ended his District cricket career at the end of the 1913/14 season, he had taken 167 wickets over seven and a half seasons, at an average of 17.76, to go alongside 971 runs at 16.74. He had been a loyal servant to the Collingwood club as a cricketer and indeed a baseball player - there were some who attributed his unusual bowling delivery to his role as a baseball pitcher - as well as serving on the club’s committee for many years. And what of the ‘ructions’ that I referred to at the start of this section? Although in 1911 throwing was not the major issue that it had been ten or 15 years previously, and would become again some 45 to 50 years later, being ‘called’ was still a stigma that would follow a player around wherever he played. So Pitcher must have been grateful that his loyalty to his club was reciprocated at the time when he needed it most. The Collingwood club was clearly infuriated by the incidents at the MCG, seeing in it an element of bias by the umpires, and wanted to take the matter further. Accordingly, on 13 March - five weeks after the no-balling - the Collingwood secretary (Mr G.Phillips) made the club’s case before the Victoria Cricket Association. Noting that Crockett had never before seen Pitcher in action, he argued that this showed that it was unwise to allow umpires to officiate in international matches (such as that between Victoria and the South Africans) unless they also umpired in club cricket. The club was also upset at the fact that Pitcher had been no-balled by Young, who had let him bowl freely in club matches, leaving unspoken the inference that Young’s decision to call Pitcher on day two may have been at the instigation of Crockett. In view of what the club saw as some irregularities which, in his opinion, the no-balling showed up, Phillips 48 There is a strong element of hypocrisy here, in that the newspapers who were now chastising Pitcher for being clearly a chucker had never commented on his action in their reports of his performances in District cricket, and neither did they ever do so. Neither seemingly had they, or did they, raise any further questions about the standard of umpiring in District cricket. No-ball!