“A better display of the art of cricket was never witnessed”: How Fuller Pilch became the best batter in the world

Fuller Pilch (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

In discussions of who might have been the greatest or most influential cricketers of all time, there is a tendency to favour more recent players. Most critics understandably nominate those who they have seen in person, although an exception is usually made for the inevitable Don Bradman, whose statistical dominance makes him a special case. Perhaps one or two players from earlier periods, for whom there is plenty of film available (preferably on Youtube), might warrant a mention but once discussion moves further back than living memory, former stars are usually neglected, usually accompanied by assertions that cricketers from so long ago cannot possibly have been as good as their modern counterparts. This phenomenon is intensified by the lack of statistical detail available for comparison, and a suspicion that — depending on the viewpoint of whoever is judging — it must have been easier to score runs or take wickets back in the dim and distant past. One or two aficionados might buck the trend and name older players such as Walter Hammond, Jack Hobbs or Victor Trumper, but for most cricket followers these are at best just names that they have heard. And then there is the case of someone like Ranjitsinhji, recorded by the history books as the inventor of the leg-glance (but who is perhaps even more interesting for his adventures off the field). Or what about W. G. Grace? To those familiar with cricket history, he might stand comparison with Bradman: the man who invented modern batting, combining forward play, back play, attack and defence. But if we go back even further, cricket was a very different game on (and off) the field, so that any hope of statistical comparison breaks down hopelessly. Which is unfortunate because if we continue backwards, we come across names that were legends for a century after their playing days were over.

Standing at the head of this semi-legendary list was Fuller Pilch, perhaps the most famous batter before the emergence of W. G. Grace. During his playing days, there was a general consensus that Pilch was the best batter in England — and therefore the world. While never achieving the statistical dominance of those who followed — for example Grace, Ranjitsinhji, Hobbs, Hammond — any impartial assessment has to place Pilch among those names because of what he achieved at a time when batting was often little more than a lottery. When Grace emerged, it was with Pilch that he was most often compared in trying to decide who was the greatest; and not everyone agreed that Grace was better than Pilch. And across the vast span of time between the end of Pilch’s career in 1854 and the modern day, one of his batting innovations has survived and continues to be one of the foundations of the game.

Before delving too deeply into Pilch’s story, it is worth establishing how very different cricket was when he was at his peak in the 1830s and 1840s. Cricket was played irregularly and few county teams even existed; there were no competitions or cups or championships and fixtures were arranged on an ad hoc basis with no real central authority to coordinate them. Test cricket was years away. Many games were played, especially at the major venues such as Lord’s, between what were little more than scratch teams. Part of the problem was that, at a time before the railway network had become fully established, transporting teams across the country was simply uneconomical. Single-wicket matches were still extremely popular, and followed closely by the press and public. While there were amateur and professional cricketers (Pilch was a professional), the distinction was less pronounced than it became; later generations of amateurs were more eager to keep professionals in their place, but in Pilch’s time the relationship was more benevolent. He described it: “Gentlemen were gentlemen, and players much in the same position as a nobleman and his head keeper maybe.” And the concept of what today would be called first-class cricket was largely unknown, although there was a sense that some matches were more important than others.

On the field, it was a similarly different game. When Pilch first played at Lord’s in 1820, the only legal form of bowling was underarm. Although “round-arm” bowling — in which the ball could be released from shoulder height — was widely used and became very effective, it was not officially permitted until 1835. Few, if any, batters used pads or gloves and on the field, long-stop was an essential position. The science of tending to pitches was almost unknown, and therefore the wickets were rough and untamed: the ball bounced unevenly (shooters were common) and could rise sharply if it struck the stones which were found in many playing surfaces. For bowlers who spun the ball, there was a huge amount of help from the pitch. Furthermore, games were generally played without a boundary — all hits were run out, with no fours or sixes. There might have been exceptions; during Pilch’s benefit match in 1839, wagons were used to enclose the ground, but we do not know if hits beyond this point counted as extra runs. But one contemporary critic said that “Pilch played cricket, W. G. plays boundary”. In these circumstances, run-scoring was incredibly challenging; reaching double figures was an achievement and scores of 20 were perhaps as valuable as a century in modern cricket. And the development of round-arm (which gradually metamorphosed into over-arm) bowling was even more of a challenge; the big scores that had begun to accumulate before 1820 against simply lob-bowling disappeared and did not reappear until the time of Grace. Cricket had become a low-scoring game, and the surviving statistics reflect this. Those who later championed the claims of Pilch as one of the best ever were quick to remind audiences how difficult it was to score back in the 1830s and 1840s.

This, therefore, was the cricket world into which Pilch emerged and established himself as the best; alongside Nicholas Felix and Alfred Mynn, he became one of the few household names who played the sport. How did he reach that peak?

Fuller Pilch was born on 17th March 1804, at Horningtoft in Norfolk. He was the seventh (not the youngest as has often been claimed) child of Nathaniel Pilch (a tailor) and Frances Fuller (who was the widowed Nathaniel’s second wife). Records are scarce from so long ago — individuals were not recorded on the census until Pilch was 37 — and so there is much that we do not know. But Pilch’s later fame meant that some details were recorded; he and his two older brothers (the only three out of Nathaniel and Frances’ five sons to survive until adulthood) William and Nathanial followed their father’s trade, becoming tailors. However all three proved to be good cricketers as well. There are suggestions — based on one questionable newspaper report — that Pilch spent time working in Sheffield as a young man, and learned cricket there, but it is perhaps more likely that he played village cricket in Norfolk.

There are more plausible claims that Pilch was coached by William Fennex, one of the Hambledon stars from the period in the late eighteenth century when cricket’s popularity first exploded, and one of the first men to use what would today be known as forward play; Fennex himself claimed to have taught Pilch how to bat. The author Frederick Gale wrote in 1883: “Fennex, be it remembered that he inaugurated the free forward play, and taught it to Fuller Pilch, and Fuller Pilch taught the world; for I feel confident, in my own mind, that all the fine forward play which one sees now sometimes, is simply the reflex of what Fuller Pilch developed in a manner which has never been surpassed by any living man (except W. G. [Grace]), and that, too, in days when grounds were less true, and pads and gloves were unknown. And I say of my friend W. G., that he has simply perfected the art which Pilch taught, though Pilch was never such an all-round man as our present champion.” We shall return to Pilch’s pioneering forward play later.

As Pilch improved as a cricketer, he was selected to play for Norfolk — in reality at that time little more than the Holt Cricket Club — and he made his debut in “big cricket” when he played for Norfolk against the MCC at Lord’s in 1820. Pilch was just seventeen at the time, and played alongside his brothers Nathaniel and Francis. But the three fielded while William Ward scored 278 runs, the highest innings in what would today be called first-class cricket until W. G. Grace scored 344 in 1876. Pilch, at that time picked as much for his under-arm bowling as his batting, scored 0 and 2 as the MCC won by 417 runs. But for modern statisticians, this was his first-class debut, even though no-one would have had any notion of what that meant at the time.

Fuller Pilch in 1852 (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The irregular and disorganised nature of cricket at this time mean that it is hard to track Pilch’s career in terms of statistical achievements. But he gradually became a more accomplished batter even though he did not play anything else recognised today as “first-class” until 1827. In 1823, he moved to Bury St Edmonds, and from 1825 to 1828, he played as a professional for Bury Cricket Club — his first century was scored for the club against Woodbridge in 1830 — and represented Suffolk. In this period he made some substantial scores and was selected for the Gentlemen v Players match for the first time in 1827. That year, he also played for a team styled “England” against Sussex in a series of three matches intended as a trial of the fairness of the new style of “round-arm” bowling (used by Sussex in those matches) and top-scored in the first game with 38. He did not stand out in the other games and, with several other “England” players threatened to pull out of the final game unless the Sussex bowlers reverted to underarm, before ultimately agreeing to play. But Pilch quickly learned to face the new style of bowling, adopted it himself, and when asked in later years about what it was like facing the old underarm style, replied: “Gentlemen, I think you might put me in on Monday morning and get me out by Saturday night”.

Pilch moved to Norwich in 1829, becoming the landlord of the Anchor of Hope Inn, and began to play for Norfolk, which was established on a more formal basis in 1827. Within a few years, it was one of the strongest teams in England, not least owing to Pilch’s batting. And in 1833, he became famous through two single-wicket matches against Tom Marsden, the “Champion” of England. Single-wicket was a highly popular form of the game at the time and was played under various rule. The main versions involved two players opposing each other without assistance in the field. Hits behind the wicket did not count, and batters had to run to the other end of the pitch and back to score a single run. Pilch comfortably won the two matches: in the first, played at Norwich, he won after dismissing Marsden for seven, hitting 73 runs himself and then bowling Marsden seventh ball for a duck, winning by an innings. In the return match at Sheffield, before 12,000 spectators, Pilch scored 78, to which Marsden could only reply with 25. Pilch hit 102 and facing an impossible task, Marsden was dismissed for 31. Just over ten years later, William Denison said of this game: “Pilch’s batting was of the finest description, and a better display of the art of cricket was never witnessed in any former match.” The contest was a huge attraction and received a great deal of press coverage. But for all his success, Pilch disliked single wicket matches and rarely took part: he turned down several opportunities (he and Alfred Mynn seem to have actively avoided facing each other in that format) and only seems to have played one other game (in 1845).

In other cricket, Pilch’s fame grew and there were hardly any big matches in which he did not feature. He played for Cambridge Town, “England”, the MCC, Norfolk, the Players, Suffolk and Surrey, and as a given man for the Gentlemen. He also featured in several of the “novelty” teams which were popular at the time, such as for the Single against the Married or the Right-handed against Left-handed. Perhaps his greatest year came in 1834. In two games for Norfolk against Yorkshire, he scored 87 not out, and 73 and 153 not out; he also scored 105 not out for England against Sussex and 60 for the Players against the Gentlemen. According to Gerald Howat (in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), “his aggregate of 811 runs in major matches was not surpassed for twenty-seven years.” Such considerations were meaningless in 1834 — batting averages were not widely published, if at all — but his average of 43 in those games dwarfed the next best, which was only 18. And in matches retrospectively reckoned first-class, he scored 551 runs at 61.22. But perhaps more importantly he had reached three figures in “major matches” for the first time, in a period when such feats were a rarity.

By then probably the best batter in the world, Pilch was in considerable demand and Norfolk could not hold on to him. A Kent county team — the second such attempt — was founded in Town Malling by a pair of lawyers called Thomas Selby and Silas Norton. After the 1835 season, they persuaded Pilch to move to Town Malling in return for £100 per year, for which he would play for Kent and manage the cricket ground. He made his Kent debut in 1836 and remained with the county until 1854, during which period he was a key figure in making it the strongest team in England. Perhaps its most powerful opposition came from another of Pilch’s teams: William Clarke’s professional touring side, the All-England Eleven. Clarke’s team made a huge impact on English cricket, and Pilch was a founding member, playing for the Eleven from 1846 until 1852. He played at least 65 matches for the Clarke’s Eleven, usually in games played “against the odds” (i.e. against teams featuring more than eleven players, to make the game competitive), and scored four half-centuries. But Pilch was not limited to playing for these teams. At a time when county cricket was an unregulated free-for-all, Pilch also made appearances for Hampshire, Surrey and Sussex. He was also a dominant figure in club cricket; he named his innings of 160 for Town Malling against Reigate in 1837 as one of his best.

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A scorecard showing Pilch’s innings of 60 for All-England against Nottingham in 1842

While Pilch was an undoubted success on the pitch — for example, he was the Kent’s leading scorer in twelve out of nineteen seasons — he did not play regularly because Kent, like all county teams in this period, only rarely took the field. And his statistical achievements have been utterly dwarfed by the inflation in scores that took place in the later part of the nineteenth century; to a modern audience, his average looks poor but at the time, given the challenges of batting, it was a different story. His record surpassed that of any of his contemporaries. He scored eleven fifties for Kent in 84 matches today reckoned first-class, with a highest score of 98, and his average of 19.61 was very good for the time. Of these matches, 36 were played against a team styled as England, which contained many of the best players: in these games, he scored four fifties and averaged 18.15. And in the Gentlemen v Players match, which was the highest form of representative cricket in England in the days before Test matches, he played 23 matches — 21 for the Players (the professional team) and two as a “given man” for the Gentlemen (the amateur team) to make the match more competitive — and averaged 14.90. As a point of contrast, he was easily the dominant batter for Kent in this period. Of his contemporaries to score 1,000 runs for the county, none approached his average: Tom Adams had 2,291 runs at 12.58; Nicholas Felix scored 1,528 runs at 16.79; and Ned Wenman had 1,063 runs at 10.42.

Hidden among the fragmented and hard-to-process figures, Pilch was remarkably consistent. It was a matter of some note that in 1836, he reached double figures in 13 innings (five of which surpassed 20); and in 1841 he reached double figures 16 times (not all of which are today judged as first-class) within which were two scores in the 20s, two in the 30s, three in the 40s and one in the 60s. In his Sketches of the Players (1844), William Denison listed many of these achievements, and wrote of Pilch: “But there are other seasons wherein Pilch has outshone all his competitors, and were they to be enumerated, it would be be to extend this publication to a size far beyond that of a ‘sketch’.” He also stated: “As a bat, [Pilch] has been one of the brightest luminaries of the cricket world, during the last 20 years.” In short, there was little doubt of Pilch’s class and superiority; he was quite simply the best batter who had played until then.

This was a precarious time for county clubs and several teams flitted in and out of existence. Kent was no exception: the Town Malling incarnation of the club struggled financially and collapsed in 1841. But Pilch maintained his Kent contention. When the brothers John and William Baker, the founders of the Beverley Club at Canterbury, took over the organisation of Kent teams in 1842 (when their club effectively assumed the role of the county team), they appointed Pilch as the manager of the Beverley Ground. When the proto-Kent team moved to the St Lawrence Ground in 1847, Pilch again moved with them, taking charge of that ground too. There are a few other traces of his life around this time. Despite claims by Denison, there is little evidence that Pilch ran a public house in Town Malling. Instead, he seems to have worked as a tailor in cricket’s off-season; this was the occupation recorded on the 1841 census (which was taken when he and the Kent team were staying at The Bear in Lewes, during a match against Sussex).

For all of Pilch’s later claims — such as the Kent team being a “eleven brothers’, or that “as soon as a man had been 12 months among the cherry orchards, hop gardens and pretty girls, he could not help becoming Kentish to the backbone” — his loyalty to Kent perhaps owed more to finance than emotion. After being awarded a benefit match — the lucrative Kent v England game in 1839 — he accepted an offer (“too good to refuse”) from Sussex to move county; it required the intervention of some of Kent’s wealthier patrons to persuade Pilch to remain where he was.

Pilch played on until 1855, when he was 52 — he later admitted that he and several of his team-mates kept going too long, meaning that Kent declined in the 1850s — having spent 35 years playing at what then was the top level. In terms of what is today judged as first-class games, Pilch scored 7,147 runs at 18.61, including three centuries and 24 fifties. He also took 142 wickets (although analyses do not survive for most of these). But it was noted at the time that he had scored ten centuries in total, a remarkable number for the time; he was also reckoned to have appeared 103 times at Lord’s.

The Saracen’s Head in Canterbury, photographed around 1945; the building was demolished in 1969 (Image: Dover Kent Archives)

Pilch continued to play minor cricket for one more season, appearing for the Beverley Club in Canterbury, and then from 1856 until 1866 concentrated on umpiring: in this period, he stood in 28 matches today reckoned first-class, almost all of which were played in Canterbury (although he had no great reputation as an umpire). He also had other cricketing interests. He began to work as a bat manufacturer — his occupation as given on the 1851 census — and continued as what would today be termed the head groundsman of the St Lawrence Ground until 1867. This was not the only ground with which he was associated. In 1849–50, he went into partnership with Edward Martin, another Kent cricketer, and developed the Prince of Wales Ground in Oxford, where he undertook winter coaching. This business partnership ended in 1855, at which point Pilch began another partnership with his nephew William Pilch, in whose house he was living in 1851. The pair became joint licensees of a Canterbury public house called the Saracen’s Head. It is not quite clear how the responsibility was split: the proprietors were often given as “F. and W. Pilch”, but William was sometimes named alone, and was listed as the head of the household on the 1861 census. From the little evidence that survives, William looks to have been the primary licensee. For example, on the 1861 census when Pilch was living at the Saracen’s Head with his nephew, William was listed as an innkeeper employing three male and three female servants; Pilch by contrast gave his occupation as a cricketer.

This particular business scheme was destined to end badly. William continued to run the Saracen’s Head for most of the 1860s but drifted into growing financial strife. Part of the problem was the new railway station that had been built in Canterbury; whereas the Pilches had previously enjoyed the custom of people (such as farmers) who would stay overnight in their establishment, the growth of the railways made this unnecessary as journeys could be made more quickly with no need for overnight accommodation. As a result, the Saracen’s Head lost valuable business. But there was also something of a financial crisis at the time that affected many small businesses after a leading bank in London collapsed. It was probably a combination of these factors that led to William’s ruin: in 1868 he was imprisoned for debt and declared bankrupt the following year, owing his creditors almost £700. By then, Pilch’s health was bad and he had been forced to give up his work as groundsman. His friends seemed to think that the problems over money with the Saracen’s Head had a negative effect on him; more than one report stated that it had been Pilch himself who had been declared bankrupt. Frederick Gale for example wrote in The Game of Cricket (1888): “The last time I saw Fuller Pilch was a few months before his bankruptcy, which, I believe, killed him. The world did not prosper with him as it ought, and he was out of spirits, and got so excited about the old times that I had to drop the subject.”

Pilch’s failing health — he was suffering from rheumatism — forced him to give up work and money became a struggle, especially with the problems faced by his nephew. Some Kent supporters arranged a subscription which it was hoped would provide him with a pension, but it fell short of expectations; some wealthy patrons had to top up the fund to provide him with an income of one pound per week. In April 1870, Pilch’s health took a turn for the worse. On 1 May 1870, he died at William’s home on Lower Bridge Street in Canterbury from what was then known as dropsy but would today be called fluid retention (or oedema); the actual cause was perhaps most likely to be heart failure. As a mark of the respect in which Pilch was held, a collection was taken among the public, the proceeds of which were used for a memorial. An obelisk was placed over his grave at St Gregory’s Church, which was moved to the St Lawrence ground in 1978 after the church had fallen into disuse. In 2008, Pilch returned to the news when plans by Christ Church University to redevelop the site of St Gregory’s were paused after it became clear that no-one was sure where Pilch was buried. An old photograph of the memorial eventually cleared up the mystery, and work went ahead; a new headstone was placed to mark the approximate location of Pilch’s grave.

The original memorial to Pilch in St Gregory’s churchyard, Canterbury, in the 1950s (Image: Kent Online)

So much for the facts. It is perhaps not as complete a story as we would like, nor could it ever be as detailed as a biography of Grace or Ranjitsinhji or Hobbs because it was plainly a very different world for cricketers of Pilch’s time. It is not possible to simply go through each season and note his scores in the biggest games or reel off impressive aggregates and averages. And yet there was no doubt among Pilch’s contemporaries that he was the best of all. As it happens, it is possible to get a glimpse of what might have made Pilch so good. But that is not the only way in which his legend continued. His reputation endured so that when W. G. Grace came along, Pilch was still for many the point of comparison. For some who remembered him, Pilch’s success must have been more meretricious simply because batting was more difficult back then. And so, more than 30 years after his death and over half a century since he last took to a cricket field, Pilch’s name became embroiled in a debate that has never been settled: was cricket a sport that continually improved, or one that was in a permanent state of decline? Were those who played in the past better than those seen in contemporary cricket? Or were the current players the best of all time?

“It could go on till Christmas”: Bosser Martin and the Role of the Groundsman

A. W. “Bosser” Martin pictured before the record-breaking scoreboard for the Oval Test match of 1938 (Image: @PictureSporting on Twitter)

Without groundstaff — the men and women who prepare the pitch and tend to the whole playing area — no game of cricket could ever be played. Before the players or spectators arrive and when everyone else has gone home, they continue working; even during the winter they still have tasks to complete. The head of the groundstaff is known by different titles. In Australia, he or she is usually referred to as the “curator”, a neutral title which fits much better into modern cricket than the stubbornly male description “groundsman” still used in Britain. While some curators/groundsmen have become relatively well-known, they are usually anonymous. However, one man actively sought the limelight and attracted the headlines — even to the extent of attending the toss in a Test match and being photographed by its scoreboard. This is the story of “Bosser” Martin of Surrey: a man who loved publicity, but who loved his carefully tended pitch at the Oval even more.

Austin Walter Martin was born on 6 October 1872 in Bromley. His father William was a gardener; his mother, Anne Rose, was the daughter of a bailiff. Martin was one of eleven children (ten of whom lived until adulthood), of whom he was the middle child. Two of his older brothers followed their father into the business of gardening, but Austin seems to have immediately specialised in cricket grounds. The 1891 census lists him boarding at 18 Clayton Street, Kennington, with a family called Elliott, and his occupation is “groundsman” (which someone has annotated with “?cricket”). Clayton Street leads to the Oval Cricket Ground, where Martin was already working. An interview printed in the Leicester Evening Mail in 1938 suggested that he also “used to be a more than useful player”, although there are no obvious records of games in which he played.

Martin joined the Oval groundstaff at a time of great change in pitch preparation (the details here come from a 1991 book by R. D. C. Evans called Cricket Grounds). Grounds had been looked after by dedicated staff since the first cricket pitches were enclosed for spectators, and even earlier. But the men who tended to surfaces in the early nineteenth centuries were usually farm hands, attracted to the role by better pay and conditions than they could expect working on a farm. At this time, the pitch was swept to keep it clear of stones and debris, the grass was cut — by hand using scythes until the mid-nineteenth century and by mechanical mowers after that — and the surface flattened using a hand-drawn roller, but that was as far as preparation went. But from the 1880s onwards, groundstaff became increasingly sophisticated in how they tended to the pitch. Heavier rollers were used, often pulled by horses. Instead of relatively unskilled farmhands, pitches came increasingly under the care of gardeners, who had more specialist knowledge.

During this period a crucial change was made in pitch preparation. By the late nineteenth century, it was recognised that clay soil formed the best playing surface, and such material was imported to different grounds and applied liberally to the pitch; marl was soon discovered to be the best of these. Wickets treated in this way greatly favoured batters; as a result, runs were scored in greater numbers than ever before and totals skyrocketed. But, as has always been the case in cricket, there was disquiet at the changes. Lord’s Cricket Ground was particularly opposed. The MCC did not employ a full-time professional groundsman until 1864 and did not buy a heavy roller for another seven years. It was unsurprising that the Lord’s pitch was notoriously poor and often dangerous. In 1870, a batter called George Summers was struck on the head by a ball which reared from a pebble; four days later he died from the injury.

Even then, there was resistance from the MCC to new technology. For example, the MCC President in 1884, Robert Grimston, insisted that the only interference in the natural state of the pitch should be the use of sheep to keep the grass short, a rustic method of maintenance long abandoned at most grounds.

The Oval in 1891 (Image: Wikipedia)

Other ground authorities were far more forward looking, and none more than at Surrey. The task of looking after a cricket pitch had become very specialised and by the mid-1880s, the job of head groundsman had become far more professional. Large teams of people were employed to take care of the playing surface, and their role extended far beyond the standard cricketing months. One of the first “modern” groundsmen, and the first to make an impression on the wider cricket world, was Sam Apted. He became head groundsman at the Oval in 1888, a position he held for 24 years. Jack Hobbs remembered: “Old Sam, we used to say, knew every blade of grass on the ground: we really believed he would miss one if it were plucked. He used to keep us professionals well away from the middle during practice time and used to shout at us in anything but moderate terms.” It is likely that it was Apted who recruited Martin to work at the Oval.

But this gradual evolution of the role of groundsman — from labourer to gardener to specialist — can be seen very clearly in the life of Martin’s older brother, Thomas Richard Martin. On the 1891 census, he is listed as a “domestic service gardener”, presumably meaning that he was employed to look after an individual’s garden. When he married in late 1895, he was still a gardener, but by the time of the 1901 census, he was a groundsman at an “athletic sports ground”; as he lived in Wandsworth, it is perhaps unlikely that he worked at the Oval at that time. But by 1911, he lived at 25 Kennington Oval, giving his occupation as “Gardens (cricket ground)” and listing himself as an “employer”. And in 1912, Thomas Martin succeeded Sam Apted as the head groundsman at the Oval. By then, motorised rollers had begun to be used, giving groundstaff even more control over their pitches (although hand and horse-drawn rollers remained in use for many years, especially at smaller grounds).

Meanwhile, Austin Martin married Elizabeth Mary Palmer in 1899. The 1901 census records Martin still living on Clayton Street (albeit at a different address), with his wife. Ten years later, the couple lived with their two children (a third followed in 1913) on Durham Street; he gave his occupation as “labourer” but someone wrote in pencil the words “gardener” and “Surrey County Cricket Club”. He must have spent several years working for his brother. And in 1924, Martin succeeded Thomas as head groundsman at the Oval.

The period when Martin took charge at the Oval was one of the heaviest scoring in history. The continued development of pitch technology had struck upon a magic formula for producing smooth, flat batting pitches which were guaranteed to produce a mountain of runs as long as the weather remained dry. A combination of marl mixed with farmyard manure was increasingly used to deaden playing surfaces, making them very easy for batting — a process which became known as “doping”. Australian curators had perfected this process, not least because until 1926–27, matches in the Sheffield Shield were “timeless” — played to a finish with no limit on the number of days — so that it was in the interest of ground authorities to extend games for as long as possible to bring about higher attendances; they also enticed spectators with the prospect of record-breaking numbers of runs. Even when Shield matches were reduced to five days from 1927–28 and four days from 1930–31, Test matches remained “timeless” in Australia until after the Second World War. The former Australian player J. W. Trumble lamented in the 1927 Wisden about this practice. He noted that the pitch at the Melbourne Cricket Ground consisted of a layer of heavy clay which was over a foot thick, the culmination of forty years of applying clay dressing. He described how a pitch was flooded before a big game and once it was soaked, a heavy roller was repeatedly applied until it dried, resulting in a very hard “marble slab” surface. Trumble worried that if groundsmen were left to their own devices, this would be the result everywhere, and he warned that English pitches were heading the same way.

And certainly the batting surfaces in England in the 1920s and 1930s were becoming much too good for matches to be completed in the three days allocated to the County Championship. Many disapproved of the increasingly flat surfaces. Charles Stewart Caine, the editor of Wisden, wrote at length about the issue in the 1929 almanack, following exceptionally heavy scoring in the 1928 English season. Good weather had resulted in excellent pitches for batting, and there were 37 totals of 500 or more in the County Championship, as well as 13 opening partnerships of 200, 29 double centuries, 414 centuries (including one innings which featured four hundreds and another fifteen innings had three centuries in them). Caine noted: “Five players scored over 3,000 runs apiece whereas previously the whole history of cricket furnished no more than ten instances of that aggregate having been reached … With the scoring so high in the large majority of games in 1928 and, owing to rain, very little play in seven encounters, rather less than half the 240 contests constituting the County Championship programme were brought to a definite issue.”

Opinion was divided on how to tackle the heavy scoring. Some thought the answer was to change the lbw law to favour bowlers; others thought a larger set of stumps or a smaller ball might help. But many believed the fault lay with the groundsmen and their use of what Caine called “marl, liquid manures and other dressings”. He continued: “It may be there are some grounds where the turf is such that something to make it last three days is absolutely necessary — I seem to remember many years ago one or two which in dry weather used towards the end of a match to turn either fiery or dusty — and it is likely enough that some of the old ground-keepers applied privately some decoction of their own. Unless I am much mistaken the wickets of fifty years ago were, generally speaking, naturally prepared pitches, i.e., made fit for play by water and roller only, the roller, moreover, being of no such weight as that in use at first-class grounds to-day.”

Martin (right) and his groundstaff preparing the Oval pitch before the 1932 season (Image: Daily Mirror, 13 April 1932)

Caine dismissed the counter-argument — that underprepared pitches might not last three days, or might be dangerous when fast bowlers utilised them — and did not care if games finished early on “natural” surfaces. But the authorities were less sanguine over such concerns, particularly given the financial impact of truncated games; this was also the period when pitches were increasingly protected from the elements, largely for financial reasons.

This was the state of play, and some of the thinking surrounding cricket pitches, when Martin became head groundsman at the Oval. And as far as it is possible to tell, none of the unhappiness surrounding “doping” affected him in the slightest. For example, when during a match in 1933 the players were fascinated after they returned from lunch to discover that a spider had weaved a web between the stumps, Martin took it as a compliment that it meant no-one could be bowled on his pitch. Martin was never shy of publicity. Even in 1932, the Daily Mirror described him as “the well-known Oval groundsman”. Before the 1934 Test, when the pitch was guarded by police as well as covered to protect it from rain or dew, Martin told the press that “it is as fine a wicket as I have had.”

The biggest matches hosted at the Oval during Martin’s time in charge were four Ashes Tests against Australia in 1926, 1930, 1934 and 1938, all of which were decisive games in the series and played without time limit (although three of them lasted four days). And apart from in 1926, which was relatively low-scoring and affected by rain, these were high-scoring games. In 1930, Australia scored 695 in reply to England’s 405 (the home team’s second innings was played on a rain-affected pitch); in 1934, Australia scored 701 and 327 to win by 562 runs. Equally high-scoring was the final Test against South Africa in 1935, when the visiting team scored 476 and 287 for six, and England reached 534 for six declared in a drawn three-day Test.

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Martin (centre) watches the toss at the Oval Test of 1938. The two captains are Donald Bradman (left) of Australia and Wally Hammond (right) of England

But his most famous pitch was the one he produced for the fifth Test of the 1938 Ashes series. Three days before the game, Martin discussed his pitch. He predicted that if the weather stayed fine (which it did), it would be “in perfect condition”. In an interview (as printed in the Leicester Evening Mail on 18 August), he revealed how he had begun final preparations a week earlier, and had “put in an hour or so each day” as well as having to “give the ground a general brush and clean, paint the seats, keep the outfield in good condition.” He believed the Test pitch “is as near perfection as it is possible to get it. I don’t mind how long the [timeless] match lasts — it could go on till Christmas if it liked.” And he was right. England scored 903 for seven declared, the highest total in Tests until 1997 and even today the highest first-class total in England. Len Hutton scored 364, the highest individual Test innings until 1958.

One story said that Maurice Leyland, who scored 187, approached Martin at one point during the game to complain in mock seriousness that there were holes in the pitch. When Martin queried this, Leyland replied: “Aye. Six — where t’stumps go in.” Another story also stated that Martin had been disappointed when England’s captain Wally Hammond declared; he had wanted a score of over a thousand to be posted on his pitch.

But the cricketing establishment were less keen on Martin’s idea of perfection. Gubby Allen — never a man shy of opinions on any subject — wrote about pitches in the 1938 Wisden in which he discussed the best way to prepare them. He was critical of the pitches at Old Trafford, Trent Bridge and even Northampton, but wrote: “It is common knowledge amongst the regular players that there have been and are many others to which this criticism applies. Owing to my close association with Lord’s, I fear I may be thought prejudiced when I say that in my opinion the nearest example of the ideal type of wicket was produced there frequently last year.” Yet Allen overlooked a famous problem a few seasons earlier at his beloved ground which Martin had been called in to fix; the pitch was infested for a time with “leatherjackets”, the larvae of craneflies.

This was part of a larger outbreak in London that year, but had quite an impact on the Lord’s pitch. The result was a number of bare patches which greatly helped spinners. This affected the outcome of that summer’s Tests; South Africa won the Lord’s match, exploiting the conditions better than England, and held on to win the series 1–0. But the Lord’s groundsman, Harry White, had struggled to control leatherjackets for several years; in an interview printed in the Dundee Evening Telegraph on his retirement in 1936, White claimed pride in keeping the Lord’s pitch “natural” and said that he had only used “dope” once in 1935, “to help the sparrows in the leatherjacket war”. But this was a somewhat selective version of the truth; the MCC had been forced to call in Martin to resolve the issue.

Martin’s obituary in Wisden explained: “[Martin] was an authority upon the subject of the destruction of insect pests. In 1935, when the turf at Lord’s suffered so considerably from a plague of leather-jackets, he was called in with successful results to act as general in the war.” This must have been something of a rebuke against White, who cannot have been thrilled at bringing in an outsider. Nor can the annual meeting of the MCC in 1936, when “special reference was made to the work undertaken by Mr Austin Martin and his son in getting rid of the plague of leatherjackets.”

And this impression is only reinforced by the identity of White’s successor as the head groundsman at Lord’s: Martin’s son (also called Austin Walter Martin) took over the role.

Allen made one comment about the Oval in his Wisden article, although clearly choosing his words carefully:

“Surprising though it may seem to many people, I have seen two of the most ideal wickets at Kennington Oval, usually considered a batsman’s paradise. One was the wicket on which the England-India Test Match was played in 1936 … The other was that interesting stretch of turf on which Surrey played Middlesex last season [1937] … [which] gave the bowlers, and especially the spin bowlers, a fair chance. I hope I am not being indiscreet when I say that that pitch had been intended for the Test Match due to commence on the following Saturday. The groundsman had no alternative but to use it, as the one which he had been preparing for the Middlesex match for some unknown reason sank on the good length at the Pavilion end. In other words, Surrey played Middlesex on a wicket which was one week short of the preparation which the groundman had intended to give it. From every point of view it was a splendid match and surely affords strong evidence that a happy medium can be found.”

Allen was, however, eager to make clear that he placed the blame with county committees rather than individual groundsmen.

The 1939 Register records Martin living at Durham Street, but the following year he retired from his position. By then, the Oval had been commandeered with a plan to using it for housing prisoners of war. Although this was never followed through, it left the ground in a severely damaged state, which had to be fixed by Martin’s successor, Bert Lock, when he was appointed in 1945.

Martin died on 22 January 1952 at the age of 80. His fame was such that his death was reported in many newspapers, and he had his own obituary in Wisden. The news even reached the New York Times. His nickname of “Bosser” was widely mentioned, although one such report claimed that he “could never say where his nickname originated”. This seems a little unlikely; it probably referred to his dictatorial manner.

There was one lasting reminder of Martin’s role at the Oval: the heavy roller he used to produce his famously flat pitches remained at the ground after his retirement. It was known as “Bosser’s Pet” and after the record-breaking score in the 1938 Test, Martin was photographed alongside “Bosser’s Pet” in front of the scoreboard — something usually reserved for batters who had accomplished a record.

In one of the many examples of cricket’s wild swings in orthodoxy, by the 1960s the establishment disliked the state of English pitches, which were felt to offer far too much help to bowlers. The editor of Wisden at the time, Norman Preston, wrote in 1964: “One has to go back to the palmy days of Sir Don Bradman and follow the course of events to appreciate the effect of his mammoth scores and the speed at which he made them. In trying to provide conditions for a more even contest between bat and ball, we, in England, have arrived at the present state of mediocrity.” He continued: “To my mind the sooner we, in England, get back to pre-war standards in the matter of appurtenances the better. We want hard pitches and hard outfields. Shave away the grass and bring on the heavy roller.” His comments were brought about by the success of Lock, in preparing the pitch for the fifth Test of the 1963 series between England and the West Indies, in using “Bosser’s Pet” to produce a good batting wicket.

But the revival did not last long. An article written by Martin Williamson in 2015 about the 1938 Oval Test revealed what happened next: “In 1968, Surrey brought Bosser’s Pet, which had been languishing for years behind the scorebox, out of retirement after a summer of lifeless pitches. Chris Martin, now the ECB pitches consultant but who then had just started on the staff at The Oval, said the result was that ‘the pitches were slower and lower than ever … that roller was never used again and eventually the pitches were dug up and relaid.'”

The Sticky Wicket: How rain used to influence cricket pitches

Donald Bradman’s skied shot against Hedley Verity at Lord’s on a sticky wicket in 1934; watching (left to right) are Herbert Sutcliffe, Les Ames (who eventually caught the ball) and Wally Hammond. (Image: The Cricketer, 30 June 1934)

One of the clichés of cricket broadcasting during unsettled weather is to display images of the anxious-looking groundstaff glancing at the sky and making preparations to get the covers on at the first sight of rain. But this reaction is a modern phenomenon. For many years, cricket pitches were left uncovered during the hours of play, whatever the weather. If it rained, the players ran off but the pitch remained exposed and could potentially be soaked. This obviously affected its behaviour; given the right circumstances of sun or wind after the rain stopped, the pitch could become impossibly difficult for batting as it began to dry out. This phenomenon — the “sticky wicket” or the “sticky dog” — was so well-known that the phrase to describe it has survived into everyday usage even today, many years after the last sticky wicket was seen in top-class cricket.

Sticky wickets were never the default condition. Despite the lack of covering, most pitches — particularly in England in the twentieth century — were good for batting. During dry weather, they behaved largely as they do today. When older players or journalists discuss uncovered pitches, they sometimes give an impression that batting was always difficult, but this was only the case after rain had fallen; even then, conditions had to be right to produce a “sticky”. However, the impact of these wickets upon the course of cricket matches was enormous when they did occur.

For faster bowlers, a sticky wicket meant inaction: the slippery conditions made it almost impossible for a bowler to run up at pace to deliver the ball. Although the bulk of the bowling was therefore done by spinners, who could bowl from a shorter run-up (which did not require firm ground), a fast bowler would have been able to exploit the conditions just as well had he been able to keep his footing. For slow bowlers, a sticky wicket offered compensation for days of toil on unhelpful surfaces but still represented a challenge, because accuracy was vitally important if the conditions were to be exploited. Finger spinners in particular could be utterly deadly on a drying pitch.

So what happened when there was a sticky wicket? Among players, the phenomenon was well understood and involved several stages. Rain made the pitch very soft; at this time, it was useless for bowlers. As described by Archie MacLaren — a deep thinker on the game — in an article for The Cricketer in July 1922: “When the wicket is very soft and the ball cuts through, taking the top with it, the conditions are all in favour of the bat.” The ball tended to die after pitching and no-one could turn the ball on a wet surface. Depending on how wet the pitch was, the ball might come off the pitch slowly, making it hard to time shots, but batting was easy enough.

The key moment came when the pitch began to dry. If it dried slowly, perhaps on a cold and cloudy day, the batters might survive without too much trouble. It was when the pitch dried quickly that problems arose: the worst circumstances for batting were when rain was followed by hot sun (or sometimes a drying breeze). This was when the pitch was deemed “sticky”. Although there were variations as to how the ball might behave after pitching, on a genuine sticky pitch the players could expect the ball to turn sharply with even a small amount of spin imparted. Some balls might deviate hugely, others might skid through. And worse for the batters, there was often wildly uneven bounce; the ball might rear head high or shoot through at shin level. The combination was potentially impossible.

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At the Oval in 1968, Derek Underwood bowled England to victory over Australia on a sticky wicket. Wisden said that he “found the drying pitch ideal for this purpose. He received just enough help to be well nigh unplayable.”

There were various explanations proposed for what happened: some suggested that the pitch “crusted”, allowing the ball to grip far more than usual. Others said that when the ball pitched, it dug into the drying pitch, causing the soil in front of it to “pile up” and therefore bounce unpredictably. And others thought that the indentations made by the ball when the pitch was wet began to cause huge problems once they hardened, creating uneven bounce. MacLaren’s view in 1922 was: “As the wicket dries the ball will cause the turf to stick up in tufts, when it will kick up awkwardly and the slips be likely to get several easy catches. As the game goes on, and there are drying conditions, the side which bats last on the now dried, uneven surface has a very poor time, since this is one of the most difficult wickets on which to play good-length bowling, with a bit of pace behind it, the ball playing extraordinary antics throughout.”

But as MacLaren went on to explain, this was not the whole story. The batting captain could chose to have the pitch rolled between innings or at the start of a day, which would smooth down the pitch. Batters could pat down spots where the ball had landed, smoothing out any indentations. And sometimes, if a pitch had been breaking up, the rain would effectively repair it after a rolling, making it good for batting again.

One of the best descriptions of the evolution of a sticky wicket, and some of the considerations for the captain, can be found in the former Australian captain Monty Noble’s The Game’s the Thing (1926). He described an imaginary pitch inspection: first the ground was too wet for either captain to want to play as “neither batsmen nor bowler could stand up”; after an hour only a few patches remained sodden, but a further delay of half-an-hour would have been necessary to allow footholds to dry. After the next visit, the captains would agree that play could take place in around fifteen mintues, particularly after sawdust had been applied to the footholds. When play began, bowlers “are at a disadvantage, for the ball cuts through and goes straight on fast and true.” After about an hour, the pitch would have dried enough to alter its character: “As it dries, so it begins to nip. The ball takes a little spin on touching the ground, and pieces of turf are removed. This continues more and more as the wicket dries on the top until it gets a thin veneer of fairly hard topsoil and softer underneath. This is its worst stage.”

Noble explained how the ball left indentations in the pitch, which the batters would then try to pat down. He explained that these conditions could potentially last all day, depending on the weather and the type of soil. After this, he discussed considerations in deciding whether to send a team into bat in these conditions, and other factors, such as how the slope of a pitch affected how it dried. In Nobles’ scenario, using a heavy roller would remove any indentations and level the pitch while it was still damp. However, as the pitch dried out completely over the following day (or days), any pieces of the pitch which had been cut out by the ball would begin to crumble, causing the pitch to be difficult once more; from then on, the light roller was preferable to avoid breaking the pitch up any further.

Noble also described the effect of other pitch types: ones which had been affected by rain but with no sun to follow were often “soft and spongy”, which were easy enough to bat on as the top of the surface could not dry fast enough. He discussed various other scenarios, and ways to ascertain how the surface might play. Understanding pitches was a key part of tactics, and a good captain — or his advisers — could predict how it would behave at different times. A brief comment in The Cricketer in 1924 — a very wet season — noted in passing that a wet pitch dried in a way which made batting easy in a cold wind, and that captains should take greater note of how different weather conditions affected pitches, and study how pitches played in these conditions. Mis-reading the pitch could lead to disaster, such as when England’s Arthur Carr put Australia in to bat at Headingley in 1926, expecting a sticky wicket after heavy rain, only for the pitch to prove easy for batting.

Monty Noble pictured in 1932 (Image: Wikipedia)

To further complicate matters for captains and bowlers, different types of soil reacted differently to rain; some dried faster, others were more resistant. For example, writing in Wisden in an attempt to explain the varying effects of rain during the MCC tour of Australia in 1903–04, Bernard Bosanquet noted that the “Bulli” soil used at Sydney was “absolutely impermeable to water” and only the upper layers ever became wet. Therefore Sydney wickets recovered very quickly from rain compared to others. Noble wrote that other Australian grounds often produced unplayable “glue pots” after rain — a common occurrence in Australia and the West Indies where the weather was generally hot and blazing sun could follow rain, creating perfect bowling conditions.

For everyone, the prospect of a sticky wicket hovered at the front of their minds during unsettled weather. A captain who won the toss almost always batted in dry weather, fearful of rain ruining the pitch once the opposition had taken their opportunity. There were countless examples of rain causing a huge change in conditions, to the detriment of one team. One typical example might be when Hampshire played Yorkshire at Headingley in 1920: on what Wisden called a “perfect wicket”, Hampshire scored 456 for two declared on the first day; rain ruined the pitch over the weekend and when play resumed, as “bright sunshine followed more rain”, Yorkshire could only manage 159 and 225 on a damaged pitch. Similar occurrences — when one team enjoyed the best of conditions before rain ruined the pitch — took place in many Test matches, such as when England beat Australia at Melbourne in 1903–04, at Lord’s in 1934 or in the first two Tests of the 1936–37 series. No team was ever out of the game when rain could come to their rescue, such as when Bobby Peel bowled England to victory by ten runs on a sticky pitch at Sydney in 1894–95 after his team had followed-on 261 runs behind.

While many cricket followers thought that a sticky wicket demonstrated cricket’s glorious uncertainty and loved it because it had always been part of the game, there were other factors. Uncovered pitches might allow a sticky wicket to develop but they also meant that rain would cause huge delays while the ground dried out enough to allow play. For administrators, the loss of time and the subsequent loss of gate money was a huge concern, especially at those counties which had precarious finances. And other critics thought that uncovered pitches created unequal and therefore unfair conditions; if a side had wrested an advantage in fair weather, such restricting the opposition to a low score, it was hardly sporting if their position was undermined by rain. Arguments that the luck balanced out over a season were not always proven in practice.

British Pathé film of Hedley Verity bowling at Lord’s against Australia in 1934

What seems to have tipped the balance in favour of uncovered pitches for so long was the idea that they were the ultimate test of skill. For a bowler to succeed, he needed to be extremely accurate; while a great bowler could dismiss a team in no time on a sticky pitch, a lesser practitioner could be repelled quite easily. Some of the most spectacular bowling returns came on sticky wickets: Hedley Verity’s ten for ten against Nottinghamshire in 1932 or his fifteen wickets against Australia in 1934; Wilfred Rhodes’ seven for 17 against Australia in 1902 or his fifteen wickets at Melbourne in 1903–04; Jim Laker’s eight for two in a Test trial; eight for nine by George Dennett in 1907 as Gloucestershire dismissed Northamptonshire for 12. And in the 1960s and 1970s, the last days of uncovered pitches in England, Derek Underwood earned his nickname of “Deadly” by his performances on sticky wickets, when he often proved unplayable.

And such conditions allowed batters to demonstrate that they could score even when circumstances were against them. While there was a notion in the nineteenth century that amateurs needed flat conditions to bat attractively, and tough runs were best left to professionals, it gradually became accepted that a batters skill on uncovered pitches separated the wheat from the chaff. Being able to resist the spitting, bouncing ball; keeping it away from the fielders with a dead bat; these were considered signs of a great player.

Some of the best innings in history were those played on impossible sticky wickets. The batting of Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe at the Oval in 1926 and at Melbourne in 1928–29; Victor Trumper at Manchester in 1902 and Melbourne in 1903–04; Wally Hammond at Barbados in 1934–35 and Melbourne in 1936–37; or Len Hutton at Brisbane in 1950–51. That many such innings were played by English batters reflected their domestic game; in an ordinary season an English cricketer could face varied conditions, and if pitches generally favoured batting, the regular effects of rain meant that they experienced a huge range of conditions: fast or slow, sticky or flat, hard or soft, damp or dusty. One of the biggest arguments against covering English pitches was the removal of this variety and its replacement by homogenous wickets.

But there was a parochially English flavour to the reverence for success on sticky wickets, particularly after the 1930s. Most critics viewed Donald Bradman as the greatest batter to have played cricket. But there was a distinct, albeit minority, view in England that Hobbs or Hammond were better than Bradman. Statistically, there was no case to be made, but these critics thought — probably correctly — that Hobbs and Hammond were better on a sticky wicket than Bradman. And the fact is that Bradman rarely succeeded on a sticky pitch; on the contrary he sometimes made no effort, such as his wild shot against Hedley Verity at Lord’s in 1934 which attracted a huge amount of criticism. But he, like most Australians, had far less experience in such conditions and did not really treat them seriously owing to the infrequency of his encounters. He rarely set out simply to survive, which was generally the only way to succeed other than desperate slogging. For example when Hobbs and Sutcliffe shared their two sticky-wicket partnerships, they played as little as possible at the ball, often allowing it to hit them; they eschewed drives and their main scoring shot was the pull to the short ball. Hobbs, in particular, made liberal use of footwork to get to the pitch of the ball before it could do anything unpredictable.

Such methods went against Bradman’s inclinations; he saw no value in adapting his style for something which would so rarely be a problem. But it meant that there was that one small question mark over his record for those who watched cricket on uncovered pitches and it was not a view limited to English writers. C. L. R. James, writing about George Headley in his 1963 Beyond a Boundary, made a slightly subjective comparison of the record of Headley and Bradman on sticky pitches (which were very much a matter of opinion and hard to be objective about). James reckoned that Headley averaged 39.85, with seven fifties in 13 innings on what he termed “wet or uncertain” wickets; Bradman managed just 16.66 in similar conditions, with one fifty in 15 innings (James used a list complied by the Australian Ray Robinson for Bradman’s innings). James conceded that the figures were not conclusive but served to prove a point about Headley, who enjoyed batting in conditions which favoured the bowler as it simplified batting: “On a bad wicket, it was you and the bowler … no nonsense.”

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The groundstaff working to dry the pitch during the first Test between England and India at Lord’s in 1936. Blankets were being used for the first time.

Even captains were extended. Apart from reading the pitch in the first place, they had to decide whether to bat on after rain, or to declare; they might choose to promote their tail-enders (as a kind of pseudo-nightwatchman) to protect the main batters until conditions improved. Evidence of these puzzles survives in some scorecards, such as occasions when captains have largely reversed their batting order, or made some seemingly bizarre declarations which make no sense unless the context is understood.

However, sticky wickets gradually became less fierce over the years. At one time, they guaranteed a score under 100 and perhaps under 50. But later on, it was possible to survive and even to score runs on many sticky wickets. Although the last generation of players to bat in rain-affected conditions were those who played in England during the 1970s, sticky wickets in this period were far less dangerous than their predecessors from seventy or eighty years before. This reduction in threat was being observed as early as the 1920s, when there was a general consensus that modern pitches were less susceptible to rain than they had been. For example, Charles Stewart Caine wrote in his “Notes by the Editor” for the 1928 edition of Wisden:

“Despite the wet weather, the second half of the season produced a measure of run-getting which, given similar circumstances, would in the old days, have been regarded as practically impossible. As to whether this came about as the result of the more elaborate preparation of wickets, the extremely cautious methods employed by many batsmen or to the inability of so many bowlers to-day to spin the ball, opinions will probably differ. To the general result probably all three contributed in some degree … Possibly the big thing in favour of the batsmen is the more elaborate preparation of wickets. On such occasions as sunshine followed rain, one could, in other days, be practically certain that bowlers would dominate the situation. No such general conclusion can be safely arrived at in these times. The sticky wicket does, no doubt, obtain on occasion, but often when such might be confidently expected the pitch is merely greasy. The ball comes along at different paces and turns to some extent, but it plays no such pranks as, on a caked pitch, used to render the best of batsmen helpless.”

Jack Hobbs, writing in the 1935 Wisden after his retirement, said something similar: “The one important difference between those of my early times and those of the present is that you very, very rarely see a real sticky wicket nowadays. Over-preparation [of pitches] is the cause of this, and probably the system in use at certain centres of covering the pitch completely before the match has also had something to do with it.” And the Kent amateur H. T. W. Hardinge wrote in the 1938 Wisden that “the covering of ends … has made first-class cricket a totally different game, after heavy rain, to what it was in pre-war days.”

The reasons for this, other than improvements in pitch preparation, was that the English authorities gradually altered the rules concerning the use of covering. “Uncovered pitches” were not quite the same thing in 1900 as they were in 1939, and even less so in 1980. A combination of indecisiveness and conservatism in English cricket meant that it took a very long time for pitch covering to be brought in, and it was resisted every step of the way. The first changes came before the First World War, but it took almost sixty years for full covering, as we know it today, to be introduced. And the journey was far from smooth.