Lives in Cricket No 46 - George Raikes

79 There was then a hiatus in Raikes’ career for Norfolk and he next appeared in 1909. Writing after that season, the captain Brereton Wilson said: “Of Mr Raikes I can only say that I consider him a very insidious and clever ‘googly’ bowler, and he conceals his break marvellously. The greatest feature to my mind of his bowling is his wonderful following up of the ball, which renders it most unsafe for a batsman to endeavour to play him forward or to hit him straight. It was quite a pleasure to see the distress of the Cambridgeshire bats against him at Lynn [when Raikes took 11 for 172 in the match].” He carried on the good work against Suffolk early in the 1910 season, it being reported that “the ground, hard underneath was not sufficiently wet on the surface to prevent the ball biting, and the clergyman’s mastery over length and break made him a really formidable bowler … none of the batsmen who faced him yesterday succeeded in playing him with the ease to have suggested that in time they would have mastered him.” “ An Old County Player ” wrote of Raikes’ bowling after what turned out to be easily his most successful season, 1910, when he took 57 wickets at 10.67: “Then there is the captain, whose slows have been more successful than ever this year, and who is perhaps most especially deadly in the last innings of a match when runs do not much matter, but wickets are wanted quickly. He has not only a quick break from the leg, but what is more important, the deceptive hog-backed dropping flight, which is what differentiates the slow leg break who is difficult from the one who is easy. He has, of course, very much more in his bowling than this, continual variation of the height of the flight and the length of this staple ball, and in addition an off break which turns quickly when the ground helps it, and an excellent fast ball which recalls the fact that he formerly bowled fast for the County and his University (note 3) . He has also that most deadly ball which looks like a leg break, but does not break at all, but comes very quickly off the pitch instead. Indeed it was not, we believe, till some years after he left the University that he ever seriously developed leg break bowling. And this leads one to the moral of it, which is that while what one may call natural bowlers are undoubtedly bowlers by virtue of some natural gift of peculiarity of flight or spin, any cricketer who has a possible action may hope to attain success by following the more artificial method of the leg break or googly bowler. Why don’t we have more of these bowlers? Mr Birkbeck, we believe, is an understudy of Mr Raikes, but we want more of them.” The Old County Player referred to “that most deadly ball which looks like a leg break, but does not break at all, but comes very quickly off the pitch instead” and Raikes appeared to have already mastered that by the time of his reappearance in 1904. “His first ball proved fatal to Burrell, who obstructed a straight ball with his leg.” As this delivery was surely not a ‘flipper’ (note 4) it has to be a ‘top-spinner’, a delivery whose virtues have been extolled in print by experts such as Arthur Mailey, Ian Peebles and ‘Father’ Marriott; Marriott in particular contrasted it favourably with the googly in that it comes more rapidly off the pitch and is more difficult to ‘read’. George Raikes must have been one of the earliest conscious practitioners Raikes’ Metamorphosis As A Bowler