Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

himself, but his steadiness and impeccable length made the other bowlers more formidable than they would have been without his help.” Wilson was by now reconciled to his limitations as a batsman. He was usually ten or eleven. In 1921 he had only five innings in the Championship, scoring 81 runs at an average of 20.25. Over sixty of his runs were scored in two innings. Against Nottinghamshire at Huddersfield in the match in which Wilson took nine Nottinghamshire wickets, he scored 32 and contributed to a ninth wicket stand of 44 with Roy Kilner, when Yorkshire’s first innings was teetering, that helped to put the county into a winning position. In the drawn Roses match at Headingley, he made his highest score of the season, 33 not out in a total of 489. In all matches Wilson’s batting average fell to a more realistic 12.42. The repercussions of the tour of Australia may have affected selection of the sides for the various traditional end-of-season fixtures in 1921. We know that Rockley Wilson had offended many of the cricket ‘establishment’, not so much by what he had said in his reports as by the upset they had inadvertently caused. He could have been more circumspect in his reporting. Time may have passed but any souring of relations within the international cricket community was to be deplored at Lord’s. Rockley played for Yorkshire against the MCC in the opening fixture of the Scarborough Festival but he was not included in the Gentlemen’s side to meet the Players at Scarborough, despite the outstanding season he had just enjoyed. As he had appeared in the corresponding fixture in 1919 and 1920, and as the 1921 match was to be George Hirst’s last in first-class cricket and during which he celebrated his fiftieth birthday, Rockley must have been disappointed at being overlooked. Nor was he chosen for C.I.Thornton’s XI to meet the Australian tourists at Scarborough or for the Rest of England team to play the champions, Middlesex, at The Oval. Were these omissions the price the authorities exacted for Wilson having blotted his copybook in Australia, or in modern parlance “brought the game into disrepute”? We cannot know. However, the fact that Percy Fender, who had been recalled to the England side for the Fourth and Fifth Tests against the Australians, was included in all three of the end of season games for which Rockley was overlooked, perhaps points against the punishment theory. The most likely explanation is his age. Whatever the explanation, his omission from the Gentlemen and Back to County Cricket 91