Sean Whitehead on his place in cricket history
SEAN Whitehead is still, slowly, coming to terms with his newly-acquired place in cricket history.
Whitehead had one of those “stranger than fiction” matches while playing for South Western Districts against Easterns in Oudtshoorn last week. It’s a lot to get through; Whitehead’s was only the 89th occasion in which all 10 wickets in an innings were taken by one bowler, he is just the fourth South African to do so and is one of just two players in the entire history of firstclass cricket to take 10 wickets in one innings, five in the other and have a match aggregate of 100 or more runs.
The other to achieve that feat was Edward Grace - elder brother of the more famous WG - while playing for the MCC against the Gentlemen of Canterbury in 1862. That match has first-class status although it was a 12-a-side affair.
There will be less debate about Whitehead’s very modern feat, given there were actually 11 players in both teams and there wasn’t a case of one of them being “absent” in one innings as occurred in the match in 1862.
“It’s been a few days, so it’s started to sink in, but it’s a very difficult thing to try and get your head around,” Whitehead said about his place in cricket history. “I was telling a family member that it’s a very big thing to happen in a career that is still so young. It’s not something that in the rest of your career I think you can achieve again. It’s not something that you set out to achieve. Maybe one day when you retire, and you have kids, you can look back on it, and say, there’s something that I did.”
His teammates greeted the achievement with a mixture of shock and excitement. “It’s something that may just happen once in your career and so to be on the field when it does, would be amazing for all of us,” Whitehead said.
“It was only at tea time that our coach mentioned to me that the SWD record was nine in an innings and he was talking about going for that, but I just laughed him off. We were all so focused on the match; we thought that the target we’d set them was below par, so everything else besides just taking the next wicket was very far from my mind.”
In a low-scoring affair, SWD had set Easterns 186 to win, with Whitehead having already scored 66 and 45 with the bat, and picked up 5/64 in Easterns’ first innings. Having claimed two wickets in his third over in Easterns’ second innings, he then picked up wickets in his sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th overs to finish with 10/36 from 12.1 overs, which are the 13th best innings figures in firstclass cricket.
“I didn’t really realise what was happening until the last over. When I had taken the ninth one, we were in the huddle and a lot of the guys were, ‘you’ve got one more, you’ve got one more.’ And then I kind of realised what was going on,” Whitehead said.
Still there were no nerves, not from Whitehead nor his teammates, who might have to take a catch to complete the remarkable feat. “That’s the beauty of being in a professional set up, I didn’t feel that way, and I don’t think my teammates did because all you’re doing is focussing on what you have to do, your processes and getting those right,” Whitehead said.
The celebrations were understandably “reckless,” with Whitehead adding, “my teammates were determined that I wouldn’t be getting much sleep.”
The subsequent days have been spent trying to absorb the enormity of it all. It included a phone call from the chairman of the Rochdale Cricket Club in the Lancashire League in the UK, where Whitehead plays in the South African off-season. “The chairman of my club in England said to me that it’s a career best I can never match, so it’s important that I set other goals for myself. I still want to carry on and develop as a cricketer and to do that it’s about pushing myself to improve,” Whitehead said.
Wednesday’s training session ahead of SWD’s next four-day fixture against Limpopo in Polokwane, was the first time the team had been together since the match against Easterns. “After the game, you’re just trying to treat everything as normal, you just want to get away from the game,” Whitehead said.