Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

who favoured playing back. It ends with the headmaster’s term report and the moral: Of Peter candidly I say – ability quite good, There must be mathematical corpuscles in his blood; His common sense is excellent; I’ve never known him slack: But ruin stares him in the face, because he WILL PLAY BACK! No doubt high honour beckons him to lesser spheres of fame, In scientific circles his will be a laurelled name; But yet the topmost rung of glory must his presence lack, And this his epitaph, “He failed, because he WOULD PLAY BACK.” Lay this to heart, you Prep. School boys, lest worse should you befall, And throw your left foot forward to the pitching of the ball. If you play back, a time will come when you will be too late, And then, which Heav’n forbid, you’ll suffer Rachel’s awful fate! King first learned his cricket in the late 1870s and the 1880s, and at the Lutterworth club will have been advised by the Rev Edward Elmhirst, an apostle of forward play. At Leicester his captain was Charles de Trafford, an extraordinarily aggressive hitter who excelled at the drive, once with this stroke scoring a boundary off a bare knuckle in his contempt of batting gloves. From 1895, when King made his county début, until 1904 the Leicestershire coach was the popular and irrepressible Tom Emmett, of whom Albert Knight writes that he had ‘an almost exclusive attachment to’ what was then called the ‘push stroke’. ‘Nothing pleased him more than its good execution’. This stroke was a sort of gentle drive, the front foot advanced close to the line of the ball, the front shoulder and elbow kept forward over the ball and the weight of the body transferred to the front foot at the moment of impact; but there was often little back-lift or follow-through and, crucially, the lower hand was dominant. It was played both defensively and offensively. Knight adds that ‘Many a player in first-class cricket gets forties and fifties with no other stroke than this when wickets are uniform and fast’. King was inevitably an adept at this ‘push stroke’, which Fry disdains on the grounds, inter alia , that it is weaker than the drive, is not as safe as even ‘half-cock play’ and is never necessary. King clearly weaned himself from over-reliance on this stroke, for he indubitably favoured the drive, which was in his day still the Technique and Style 31