10 Things #41

GH salutes two new books, one new song

1/ The Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy is over, sadly. Enjoy Osman’s recap.

2/ Still, never mind England and India, here’s the Phoenix and the Rockets. Ben Duckett gets bowled second ball trying to ramp David Willey; Joe Root gets out for 6 slogging England’s bowling coach; nobody makes 50 and twenty-two balls are unused. It’s The Hundred, and it could be a ‘multi-billion dollar product’; no wonder we want our own version. In the meantime, the World Test Championship rematch is…a T20 in Darwin tomorrow. Whatever you say, guys…..

3/ Friend of Cricket Et Al, Pat Rodgers has no fewer than two new books out, concerning cricketers long forgotten. Though you could not call Syd Emery and Bert Folkard unjustly unremembered, they are more than averagely interesting, and not only contemporaries but strangely comparable: the mercurial googly bowler Emery had the wonderfully evocative nickname ‘Mad Mick’, while the doughty all-rounder Folkard played a lot of his cricket for an actual asylum, Callan Park, where he was for decades a diligent attendant. So it’s Mad Mick….

…and sane Bert.

4/ CB Fry called Emery admiringly ‘the world’s best worst bowler’, mixing the dross with the dazzling. The delivery with which the Australian dismissed Jack Hobbs at Lord’s in 1912 he described in Ball of the Century terms: ‘one of the few unplayable balls I have seen, it was a perfect length on the leg stump, came fast off the pitch and hit the off stump.’ It was said that Victor Trumper knew ‘of no bowler more likely than Emery to turn a losing position into a winning one.’ Yet Smith’s Weekly thought him a little too much the jester: ‘Emery takes his cricket as a joke. His antics between the wickets in interstate cricket were a joy to the beholders. He is something of a comedian - in fact, in the view of the serious-minded patrons of the game, he approached cricket with a flippancy greatly deprecated by all right-thinking persons.’ Fined for lateness in one match, he sold his bat to pay the penalty; turned down when he appealed against the light in another match, he asked the umpire for a match which he lit. ‘If you could control your googly, Emery, you’d be a great bowler,’ Monty Noble is reputed to have advised him. I’ve always loved Emery’s immoral reply: ‘If I could control myself, I’d be a great man.’

5/ Yet it emerges in From McDonaldtown to Lord’s that Syd was nothing on his brother Victor who was discharged from the military after four months, married a prostitute previously affianced to a groom who did not turn up to their wedding, and who went on to a twenty-year career of vagrancy, assault and robbery. ‘It is hard to imagine that Syd was ever close to a brother whose life had spiralled out of control and in a completely different direction,’ says Pat coolly. Because ‘Mad Mick’, it turns out, went straight, working decades with the Tramways and becoming a pillar of Lodge Kilwinning Orient 14 in Newtown. Pat’s book concludes with a list of Australia’s known cricket freemasons, ranging from Donald Bradman and Bert Oldfield to Bob Simpson and Bill Lawry. An unforeseen twist! A googly of a life, then.

6/ Folkard’s feats for the Callan Park XI, a foundation member of Sydney’s City & Suburban Cricket Association, were legion. As Pat and his collaborator Peter Lloyd relate in The Pride of Callan Park, the team played on of the city’s most picturesque ovals, competing successfully with First Grade clubs who had the bye.

Folkard was thirty-two by the time he began on his successful career for Balmain, preluding twenty-two games for New South Wales. When selected for his country, he had to apply for the asylum’s permission to undertake the 1914-15 tour of South Africa - in the event, sad to say, war got in the way.

7/ But Folkard, like Emery, had a kind of antipode: Reggie Duff’s older brother Wally, who was committed to Callan Park with an alcohol-related psychosis in August 1904 after representing both North Sydney and New South Wales. Attendant and patient played together for the asylum team until Duff’s death in November 1921 from a leg broken playing in a match. The irony is, as the writers observe, that Duff’s death was almost certainly accelarated by the poor quality of the hospital’s attendant care. The appendix in The Pride of Callan Park features three pages of sketchy, handwritten clinical notes on Duff’s incarceration. They give the supposed cause of his mental disorder to be: ‘Worry.’ This would not have been dispelled by another resident biting off the lobe of an ear in 1916, which the staff noted laconically.

8/ Both books are splendidly produced, and well-illustrated on high quality stock. For further information, contact Pat: prodgers@stpiusx.nsw.edu.au

9/ Another Friend of Cricket Et Al, Nigel Campbell advises of a remarkable game in Division 6 East of the Surrey Championship, which he promotes as cricket’s Coldplay kiss-cam, on 19 July. Newdigate 1st XI knocked up 200, with George Daniels making a handy 54 off 52. Bottom-placed Leatherhead 2nd XI were eight for 171 going into the final over, bowled by Daniels, which was winnowed to 13 needed off the final delivery to number ten Matthew Baker. At this point, you only need land it on the cut strip, right? Alas, Daniels came out with a chest-high no-ball, which vanished for six, and went for six off the last ball also. What I like about this story is that in days of yore, you’d only have had an anecdote; these days, there’s a scoreboard and footage.

With 30 to win, you can actually here someone posit: ‘Never say never.’ By the time the last ball is bowled, the guffaws are uproarious. We’ve all been there, eh?

10/ This half of Cricket Et Al doesn’t often venture into country music but our new favourite artist is Jason Resch, formerly of Darlinghurst. Because guess where he chose as a setting for the new film clip of his new song ‘Talk of the Town’?

Regular readers will recall this website’s affinity for Murtoa’s mighty Stick Shed, Australia’s greatest building. Apparently we’ve been responsible for a few visits. I can only reiterate: if you feel like a country drive and a quasi-religious experience, Murtoa should be your number one destination. And now you have a soundtrack. Tell them Cricket Et Al sent you.