Lives in Cricket No 46 - George Raikes

100 heaviest run scorer, he was also among the top wicket-takers. His total for the season of 1910 was 1,021 points – this was only the fourth time that a player had garnered over 1,000 and indicates an exceptional season. The other players who had achieved this feat so far were Sydney Barnes, of Staffordshire, and George Thompson, of Northamptonshire (who had done it twice), and, while the two professionals had accumulated more points than Raikes, they had also played more games than the clergyman (11 or 12 as opposed to just eight). In terms of ‘points per match’ the statistics indicate that the relatively unknown Raikes had just played the most effective all-round season of the Championship to date (scoring 127.62 ‘points per match’, with Thompson almost 20 points behind in second place with 108.18 ‘points per match’, achieved in 1904). Further research may yet discover higher scoring performances but the chances are heavily in favour of those totals being by well-known professional cricketers, possibly with Test caps to their name, and not by an ageing, part-time amateur. Truly a tour de force by Norfolk’s captain. Was George Raikes A Muscular Christian? (Part two) Before the rest of Raikes’ career in the Minor Counties Championship can be dealt with, the comments of “Old County Player” on his captaincy require us to look again at the question raised in Chapter Six as to whether he was a Muscular Christian. To pluck certain phrases from the “Old County Player” : “a very keen and experienced judge of the game and of the powers of his own men and the weaknesses of his antagonists” “the chief thing which has made … Raikes such a successful captain is probably his temperament” “a sanguine and plucky cricketer himself … has the knack of inspiring the same qualities in others” “tact and bonhomie” “seems to be able to make every player … feel thoroughly at home when playing for the county and feel … that the cause of the county is his own, and play for it with the same ungrudging energy with which a public schoolboy plays for his school” “heart, or character … which can inspire in others the enthusiasm [Raikes] has” Surely this list of attributes paints a picture of a knowledgeable, inspirational skipper who could be an archetypal Muscular Christian, with the mention of “the ungrudging energy [of the] public schoolboy” very much a ‘smoking gun’? One might cavil that the evidence in this passage is not corroborated elsewhere but this is partly because the 1910-11 Norfolk Cricket Annual is the only contemporary source that informs to any depth on Raikes’ qualities as a captain. In the light of the above, it would seem that the verdict on the question of whether Raikes was a Muscular Christian is not so much the ‘not proven’ as proposed in chapter six but ‘guilty, by a majority verdict’. Raikes’ Third Spell For Norfolk: The Championship Won Again