Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

Smith that suggested that the whole object of attack was to limit the score to singles. To a great extent it succeeded. Leyland hung back in stodgy defence for five balls of an over: the sixth he twitched round his rump for a single, or suddenly flattening himself down the pitch, cover drive in an arc of speed wide of Hassett’s right hand …. Hutton played respectful dead-bat shots to over after over of stainless long hop. Here and there a ball was gently whisked towards long leg. Now and then an over-pitched ball was despatched - one needs a verb with a smack of impersonal about it - through the sparrows disputing for crumbs on the edge of the boundary behind extra cover. The score rose. The runs accrued. There was a heavy shower at tea time. It bound the wicket nicely. Not a ball could be induced to hop or slither thereafter. And as the afternoon wore on we began to get glimpses of the wristy elegance of Hutton’s late cut - the wringing-the-towel motion that put pace on the lifeless ball through the numb outfield. At last, in the evening, when in three and a half hours apiece each batsman had accumulated his automatic century, there came sudden jerky variations in the internal routine of the play. They were as disturbing as the sight of a caterpillar suddenly falling out of step with itself, halfway down the long, well drilled procession of its feet. It took the form of a number of fantastic decisions on the part of Leyland to run singles where there were no singles to run. Once he trotted off on a hopeless chase, and Badcock returned the ball with infallible speed and accuracy - to see Waite, the bowler, break the wicket without the ball in his hand …. We had a bare 350 on the board and already one wicket was down. What were they aiming at - a collapse? ….. They collected their next half-dozen runs with long-winded discretion…The day’s play came to an end at last, and we all filed out of church. ‘Tomorrow is another eternity,’ Hopfinger said to me as we parted in an atmosphere of mutual bereavement. It was all too true. Hopfinger, incidentally, was a renowned pre-war journalist but, according to Batchelor, AJ ‘Ringside’ Hopfinger had a habit of missing the crucial moment in some of the century’s greatest sporting occasions through trivial distractions. He was The match 21