Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

opening when the ball was still hard. Indeed of the 33 occasions hitherto when he had taken five or more wickets in an innings 18, including one the previous week, had been when he had opened. 31 He regularly shared the new ball for Leicestershire, often with his slower colleague Astill: on one occasion the two dismissed their opponents unchanged, a feat that, with different partners, he was to accomplish in consecutive innings in 1912. On the wicket for this match, however, the decision, even without the benefit of hindsight, was clearly wrong: Brearley should have been in the original fourteen, and on the morning Jayes was an obviously correct selection. The choice, however, should not have been, if it was indeed as the public thought, between Jayes and King: both should have played. The man to be left out ought to have been Hayward, who had been troubled by his knee in the First Test and played now against medical advice: he made but few runs and was a disaster in the field. However poorly it was actually to perform in this match, on paper the batting was strong. Hayward could have been spared, especially since Jayes was no buffoon with the bat and did actually have a first-class century to his name. We can even consider another possibility – Jayes for Haigh, a wet-wicket specialist. So the match began, with England having what Sir Home Gordon asseverated was ‘the most irrepresentative side that has ever taken the field in this country’, ‘a candle’ in comparison with ‘the sun’ which had won at Edgbaston; and of which the Australian captain Monty Noble said ‘Armstrong and I agreed that if we could not beat the team we had better sell our kits’. Noble won the toss and inserted his opponents, rightly judging that the wicket would dry further and be more conducive to batting on the second day. Laver and Cotter dismissed Hayward, Hobbs and Gunn and England was struggling at 44 for three when King joined Johnny Tyldesley, who had been kept very quiet. In an hour and 25 minutes they put on 79, working ‘very hard for their runs’, before the Lancastrian was lbw to Laver. King went on to make the top score of 60 – exactly equalling his score against the same opponents for his county two weeks before – with six boundaries out of 131 in 155 minutes. 32 Then, ‘in trying to cut [Cotter] he got the ball rather too high up on his bat, and gave Macartney, at point, a catch about as swift as The Test-Match Player 72 31 The figures for his whole career are 44 out of 69. 32 His innings was the second highest at the time in a Test Match by a Leicestershire player, after Knight’s unbeaten 70 at Melbourne in 1903/04.