Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

certainly that against the emerging strength of South Africa and an Australian team which did not particularly impress Hayes, but was still good enough to win four Tests out of five. The most likely explanation – and there are hints in the Sporting Life feature – is that he failed to adapt to the different, slower tempo of Test cricket, the longer time scale contrasting with the relative urgency of three-day cricket. The criticism of attempting to play attacking cricket before getting one’s eye in is one which a hundred years later has been levelled at Hayes’s successors in the Surrey line-up. Alistair Brown, Scott Newman and James Benning spring to mind. None has been given the opportunity to play Test cricket, so it is impossible to say how they might have adjusted. Yet the psychological approach to Test cricket has shifted in recent years and the belligerent attacking game of Jayasuriya, Gilchrist or Dhoni contrasts markedly with the grind-it-out earlier approach of Bannerman, Barrington or Boycott. Perhaps Ernest Hayes was a man ahead of his time. How he would have relished the challenges of limited overs cricket, especially Twenty20. Failure in Australia, Success at Home 67 Albert Craig, the Surrey rhymester, collecting for Hayes’ benefit at The Oval. Craig helped many beneficiaries in this way.