From royal hat-tricks to a flaming batsman, a very colourful history
Think cricket’s a bit of a stuffy sport? You couldn’t be more wrong, says MARCUS BERkMAnn...
THE greatest of all royal cricketing achievements must be that of George VI who took a hat-trick (three wickets in three consecutive balls). All his victims were present or future kings. It happened on the private ground at Windsor Castle. First up was Edward VII, his grandfather: bowled. Second: his father, George V: bowled. Third: his brother David, later Edward VIII: also bowled.
THE only cricketer ever to catch fire while playing at Lord’s was Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, playing for the MCC against Kent in 1903. ‘The first delivery I hardly saw, and it landed with a terrific thud upon my thigh,’ he wrote in Memories And Adventures. ‘A little occasional pain is one of the chances of cricket, and one takes it as cheerfully as one can, but on this occasion it suddenly became sharp to an unbearable degree. I clapped my hand to the spot, and found I was on fire. The ball had landed straight on a small tin Vesta box in my trousers pocket, had splintered the box, and set the matches ablaze.’
WARTIME RAF pilot Bill Edrich refused to give up county cricket even while pounding the Germans from the skies. He claimed that in one particularly eventful 48 hours, he flew two bombing missions, scored a century for Norfolk and bedded a local girl.
PLAYWRIGHT Sir Harold Pinter said: ‘I tend to believe that cricket is the greatest thing God ever created on earth . . . certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.’ RENOWNED commentator John Arlott began his career as a Hampshire policeman but quit when he landed the job of overseas literary producer at the BBC . . . a post previously held by George Orwell.
CRICKETERS like to squeeze puns into the titles of their memoirs. Mike Atherton called his Opening Up; Richie Benaud’s was My Spin On Cricket; Geoffrey Boycott’s: Put To The Test; Basil D’Oliveira’s: Time To Declare; Alan Knott: It’s Knott Cricket and Michael Holding: No Holding Back.
HITLER regarded cricket as ‘insufficiently violent’ for Nazis. He was taught to play by British PoWs during World War I, but particularly disliked wearing leg pads — ‘unmanly and unGerman’.