Lives in Cricket No 52 - Schooled in Cricket (2nd edition)

132 Chapter Fifteen The Lincolnshire link – a further decade in a different form of county cricket Perhaps it had been a natural thing for a player aged 44 to seek retirement from playing at the top level with Somerset. Yet if Johnny had known then, in 1955, just how successful he was yet to be, who knows, he might have continued. It is hard to conceive that at the same time as playing at Leeds and then Wakefield on Saturdays, and while still running his cricket school, Johnny became re-engaged – after a two year break – in county cricket, having no less than nine and a half seasons in the Minor Counties for Lincolnshire. He took the second largest number of wickets (424) in the history of the county even though he was 47 when this new part of his career began. He took more wickets in the Minor Counties Championship than anyone else in Lincolnshire’s long history. For those nine and a half seasons, he would have to travel from his home next to the school near Rothwell, Leeds to all parts of the neighbouring and large county of Lincolnshire as well as to much more distant away matches as far afield as Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Shropshire. For the record the only man who took more wickets for Lincolnshire was Frederic Geeson who had played for Lincolnshire for the much longer period – from 1889 to 1913 – apart from the period 1895 to 1902 when he played first-class for Leicestershire. Geeson – bowling in two different styles, sometimes leg-spin and sometimes medium pace – took 469 wickets. Johnny’s wickets came with his usual good economy – in this case 16.47 runs per wicket. He took 66 catches – most of them in his favourite close-in positions and he scored 2,963 runs at an average of 24.2 per completed innings, being the tenth most prolific