Matthew Engel, former editor of Wisden, happened on a pleasing discovery the other day. Alastair Cook’s hundred in Essex’s opening match of the season was the first century for more than a hundred years to be made in a first-class match in England with the clocks on Greenwich Mean Time.
For more than a hundred years? Since 1914 indeed when War stopped play and First-Class cricket was suspended. Other cricket was of course played. Indeed I had an uncle who claimed to have bowled Jack Hobbs (more probably bowled at Jack Hobbs) in a Services game in Ireland. All the same I would love to know who scored that last hundred in the County Championship of 1914. Wisden of course will have the answer, but I don’t have the 1915 edition.
This was Cook’s – or should one now write Sir Alastair’s? – 64th first-class hundred. That just over half of them have been made in Tests shows just how little county cricket his employers at the ECB have allowed him to play since central contracts for English Test players were introduced. Had he been permitted to play in more than a handful of County Championship matches, he would surely by now be knocking on the door of the most exclusive of batsmen’s clubs: membership restricted to those who have made a Century of Centuries, founding member being of course W.G.Grace. Mark Ramprakash was the last to be admitted and so much less first-class cricket is now played that we have mostly, I should think, assumed that the door has been locked and bolted behind him.
I suppose it’s possible – just possible – that if Alastair Cook, now retired from the Test Match arena, was to continue to play for Essex for another five, six, seven years, he might reach the magic hundred hundreds. 64 now – 36 to go; six centuries a season for six years. Not beyond one with his appetite for runs? Surely not? He’s still only thirty-four and must – should anyway – know that Jack Hobbs made a hundred hundreds after his fortieth birthday.
It’s good that he is continuing to play for Essex – even if he has given no thought to that century of centuries carrot dangled before him. I like those players who don’t regard the end of their Test career as signing-off time, but continue to play for their counties and give something back, as it were, to the club that nurtured them. Paul Collingwood, Durham’s stalwart, has just retired, but Somerset’s Marcus Trescothick soldiers on, though now well into his forties. Ian Bell continues with Warwickshire, though injury rules him out of the first months of this season. Tim Bresnan has been discarded by England and is very unlikely to be recalled, but still bowls his heart out and regularly makes runs in one of their many crises for Yorkshire. Such players give the impression of loving the game even when they have been expelled from its heights. They are perhaps less common than they used to be.
If the ECB’s reluctance to allow England-contracted players to turn out for their counties makes membership of the Century of Centuries Club ever more unlikely, Adolf Hitler did the same for some whose careers his war interrupted. Len Hutton and Denis Compton, the greatest English batsmen of their generation, bridged the gulf, but Cyril Washbrook and Bill Edrich, being very good rather than great, fell short of the hundred hundreds. Undoubtedly both would have achieved membership of the club if they hadn’t been deprived of six English summers. This being how things were, Edrich joined the RAF, flew bombers over Germany, was awarded the DFC and finished as a squadron-leader.
Subsequently a much-married man, his love for cricket was such that, his first-class career over, he played Minor Counties cricket for his native Norfolk until he was in his middle fifties. He was my first cricketing hero before – such is childish loyalty – being supplanted by Len Hutton on account of Len’s batting on the 1950-51 tour of Australia, an Ashes series in which he averaged 88. Bill Edrich wasn’t selected for that tour – on account, it’s said, of his excessively convivial habits. This was a sad mistake. The young university batsmen preferred to him both failed, and England lost the first two Tests by narrow margins.
Meanwhile in another part of the reservation – the IPL, about which I couldn’t care less – there has been a bit of a kerfuffle because the Indian off-spinner Ravi Ashwin “mankaded” the English batsman Jos Buttler. Mankading is the name given to the practice, which is rare, by which the bowler without delivering the ball runs out the non-striker – i.e. the batsman at the bowler’s end – when he has left his ground too soon. It’s thought to be against the spirit of the game and indeed the MCC while pronouncing it legal has declared it is indeed against “the spirit of the game”. Since, however, the MCC also declared that for a batsman to leave his crease early in order to try to steal a quick single is also against the spirit of the game, we have a nice philosophical conundrum. My answer would be that Ashwin just has the better of the argument, since his action, though against the spirit of the game, was lawful, while Buttler’s, equally against the spirit, was unlawful. In schoolboy cricket it’s customary to give a warning before mankading, but the MCC says warnings are not obligatory.
Incidentally, the term comes from the great Indian all-rounder Vinoo Mankad who ran out the Australian batsman Bill Brown in this way in a Test in 1947/8. The Australians weren’t pleased and talked about the spirit of the game. The Indians thought that the number of bouncers directed at their batsmen wasn’t quite in the true spirit of cricket either. And so it goes. Just as incidentally and irrelevantly, Brown and Mankad each played his greatest Test innings at Lord’s: Brown 206 not out in 1938, Mankad 184 in 1952.
On a final note: on India’s 1946 tour of England Vinoo Mankad completed the Double of scoring 1000 runs and taking 100 wickets in an English season. The ECB has now made the Double as unlikely as a Hundred Hundreds, though Wilfred Rhodes brought it off 16 times in his long career (1898-1930).
Happier times. Sic transit and all that.