Lives in Cricket No 6 - Bill Copson

reasonably look forward to being selected again for England in the future. Bill returned to the County Championship circuit for the remaining eleven Derbyshire matches. Of these games the county managed to win only three, so that they lost four places in the table. There was an exciting game versus Gloucestershire at Cheltenham when they won by one run. Copson had taken five for 45 in the home team’s first innings, when he and Alfred Pope had shared the wickets in dismissing them for only 81. Bill had another good spell of bowling in the last match of the season, at the Aylestone Road ground at Leicester, when he took six wickets for 39 runs in the home side’s first innings. Rain prevented any play on the last day. The last few county matches had been played amidst a rapidly deteriorating international situation and the county programme had barely been completed before Hitler’s invasion of Poland on 1 September brought all first-class cricket to a juddering halt. Play took place on only one ground on that fateful day, at Hove where Hedley Verity in what was sadly to be his last first-class match finished off the Sussex innings. He took seven wickets for nine runs to dismiss them for 33 runs. Yorkshire were already champions for the third year in succession. Little did many first-class cricketers foresee that there would be no more county cricket for any of them for a further six and a half years. By the end of the war a number of leading cricketers would have given their lives and for many more their careers would be over. On 5 September, the Press tidied the season away by publishing the averages. They showed Copson in fourth place, taking 146 wickets at 15.32, behind Verity, Bowes and Goddard. It was his second best performance by that particular measure. Buried away on their now depleted sports pages, several newspapers also carried a terse sentence saying that ‘MCC announced yesterday that the cricket tour to India had been cancelled.’ Copson had not been selected for the side to tour of India in 1939/40, but nor had fifteen of the seventeen players who had played in the Tests against the West Indies during the summer. If the tour had gone ahead, there might have been as many as twelve Test debutants in the three match series. 25 Although the question is perhaps 56 Test Cricket, At Last 25 The side contained only four players with Test experience, H.Gimblett, M.S.Nichols, A.W.Wellard and R.E.S.Wyatt, and four players who became Test players after the War, H.E.Dollery, S.C.Griffith, G.H.Pope and T.P.B.Smith.