Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

Foreword By Mark Ramprakash Batting at No.3 is always a challenge. You can find yourself facing the second ball of the match, or at the other end of the scale, going in to push the score along, having waited with the pads on for several hours while the openers notch up 300 or so. There is, of course, now no one in the Surrey dressing room, or even the committee room, who saw Ernie Hayes play cricket and very few to whom the name means anything at all, but the record books don’t lie and 27,000 plus first-class runs and 48 centuries say that Hayes must have had the versatility required to bat in that No 3 spot which he occupied for most of his career, much of it in the shadow of openers Jack Hobbs and Tom Hayward. As I said on a number of occasions to the media this year, any century is special and it may well be that they were even more special in Hayes’ time. There was more first-class cricket then, so there were more opportunities, but it has also to be remembered that pitches were uncovered and runs perhaps harder to acquire than they are on the batsman-friendly surfaces of today. Modern cricketers often complain about playing too much cricket and too much travelling, with not enough time for recovery and practice in between. But we do have sponsored cars, a network of motorways, decent hotels and are reasonably well paid. We can only admire at a distance the old professionals, like Ernie Hayes, who a hundred years ago played six days a week, travelled everywhere by public transport, stayed in often quite basic accommodation, endured long sea voyages to play abroad and were often dependent on a successful benefit to ensure a decent standard of living when they had retired from the game. It is all too easy to disregard our heritage and ancestry and to forget those who have gone before, but Keith’s book throws light on another age, reminds us of where we’ve come from and helps us realise how fortunate we are to be where we are today. 5