Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

78 No-ball! We can only surmise as to whether his working as a commercial traveller (iron) in Hove eight years later meant that he had fallen on hard times after coming to England. But perhaps it would be better to imagine him, not as a cricketer whose life was wrecked by being no-balled in his only first-class match, but as a (relatively) rich young thing enjoying the high life of London in the 1920s, for whom the cricket of a few years earlier had been a mere incidental. Coda The three cricketers considered in this chapter all made little mark on the overall history of cricket, and, perhaps more surprisingly, little mark on the history of that most sensitive of subjects, ‘throwing’. None of them is referred to in Ian Peebles’ history of throwing Straight from the Shoulder , and indeed they weren’t all named in the major record-books’ lists of no- balled bowlers until the third edition of the Wisden Book of Cricket Records in 1993. Even in the fourth edition of that standard work, not all of them are given their correct initials. Whether any of the three truly threw, rather than bowled, the ball is not for us to judge. But we should note that none of them were ‘called’ at a time when the issue of throwing had become a major distraction in the sport, or during one of the associated purges of bowlers with suspicious actions. Perhaps that is why they went relatively unnoticed for so long, and are little recalled. But for all of them, the call of ‘no-ball’ in their first first-class match had the same effect: it was almost certainly responsible for them never being given a second chance at first-class level. For all three of them, selection to play at that level must have been a high point of their lives up to that time, as it would be for any cricketer. Yet surely, sadly, none of the three was able to recall their venture into the first-class arena with any particular pride: a sense of shame was perhaps more likely. And all thanks to an umpire’s call of ‘no-ball’.