Free Spirit On The Water by Mike Harfield

D.E.V. Padgett and I.V.A. Richards before him, I still always look for V.V.S. Laxman’s score first. It’s only a mild affliction. It doesn’t do anyone any harm. It’s good to have obsessions as long as they don’t completely take over your life or do damage to otherpeople. It’s really just about having an emotional connection with things. I’ve managed to convince myself that this is true and that’s all that really matters!
    9 Russell Endean, Andrew Hilditch, Mohsin Khan, Desmond Haynes, and Graham Gooch were the others. Michael Vaughan was also dismissed against India this way later in the same year as Waugh.

5. England tour of South Africa, 1913/14
    It is always difficult to judge these things but S.F. Barnes has a strong claim to be the greatest bowler who ever lived. His long career was coming to an end when Sir Don Bradman started playing and so the cricket world was denied the intriguing confrontation of Barnes bowling to Bradman.
    Sir Jack Hobbs, whose 197 first-class centuries and sheer brilliance makes him a strong contender to Bradman as the best batsman who ever lived, played at the same time as Barnes. Hobbs was not given to hyperbole and said simply that Sydney Barnes “was the greatest bowler ever”. C.L.R. James, not known for being loose with his praise, described him as “the greatest of all bowlers”.
    The tour that set the seal on his greatness was the one to South Africa in 1913/14. It is not possible to fully appreciate his achievements on that tour without first looking at how he came to be opening the bowling for England in South Africa at the ripe old age of forty.
    Barnes’s cricket career up to that point had been somewhat idiosyncratic. He was first picked for England in 1901 when he was selected to go to Australia after a season playing for Burnley in the Lancashire League. Not exactly the traditional route into the England team, even in those days. A century later, Jimmy Anderson followed in his footsteps. He had not played any first-class cricket when he was picked for England in a One-day International. He had, however, played for Burnley.
    Sydney Barnes had two people to thank for being on the boat to Australia. One was Archie MacLaren, the Lancashire captain and the other was Lord Hawke, Yorkshire’s captain for twenty-eight years and president for forty years. An aspiring Tyke demigod, Lord Hawke insisted that all players who represented the county should be born in Yorkshire although he himself was born in Lincolnshire. An Eton and Cambridge education obviously provides you with a philosophical sophistication that enables you to accept apparent inconsistencies in life.
    MacLaren was the England captain at the time and it was the captain’s job to select a team to go to Australia. 10 He naturally wanted to take Wilfred Rhodes and George Hirst, two of the best bowlers in England. Unfortunately for him, they both played for Yorkshire and Lord Hawke vetoed their selection for England. He wanted them ‘fresh’ to play for Yorkshire the following season and evidently felt that a tour to Australia would tire them out. Yorkshire first, England second was his view. There are still a number of sympathisers to this approach in the county today.
    Rhodes and Hirst had just helped bowl Yorkshire to the Championship title. There was intense rivalry between Lancashire and Yorkshire in general and MacLaren and Hawke in particular. Lord Hawke dominated Yorkshire cricket at the time, and he wasn’t about to help out his Lancastrian rival, even if it was in England’s cause. MacLaren needed to look elsewhere for a cutting edge to his bowling attack to take on the Australians.
    News of the bowling exploits of Sydney Barnes in the Lancashire League had reached the ears of Archie MacLaren and he invited him to play for Lancashire in the last championship match of the season. Barnes bowled superbly, taking 6 for 70 inthe first innings. This was enough to convince MacLaren to take him to