The man at the other end

Tony Lock bowled sixty-nine overs at Old Trafford in 1956 and took one wicket for 106.

He was, at that point, among the best slow left-armers in the world. He took a hundred first-class wickets in twelve consecutive seasons. He was bowling on a turning pitch, from one end, while the other end took nineteen.

What happened at the other end

England made 459. Australia batted after tea on the second day and were 48 for none.

Jim Laker then took nine for 37 from 16.4 overs. The match notes record that he finished the innings with seven wickets for eight runs in twenty-two balls. Australia were all out for 84 with no extras and followed on.

Then it rained. Australia went from 53 for one at the close of the second day to 59 for two at the close of the third and 84 for two at the close of the fourth. Two full days of a Test match produced 31 runs and one wicket.

On the last day the sun came out and the pitch dried.

Laker took the other ten. Fifty-one overs and two balls, twenty-three maidens, 53 runs, ten wickets.

Full scorecard: England v Australia, 4th Test, Old Trafford, 26–31 July 1956 →

Nineteen for 90

It is the only time anybody has taken nineteen wickets in a first-class match, let alone a Test. The next best in any first-class match anywhere is seventeen.

Colin McDonald batted 337 minutes for 89 to try to save it. Ian Craig batted 259 minutes for 38. Australia’s second innings lasted 150.2 overs and produced 205 runs, which is a rate of 1.36, and they still lost by an innings and 170.

Why nobody will do it again

Not because bowlers are worse. Because the pitch was uncovered.

Rain got into that surface across two washed-out days and then the sun baked it, and what Laker bowled on for the last two sessions was a strip that behaved in a way no groundsman is now permitted to produce. Pitches have been covered against rain in Tests since the 1980s.

The nineteen is not a record that stands because it is hard. It stands because the conditions that made it possible were legislated out of existence.

Lock

Fourteen overs, three maidens, 37 runs, one wicket in the first innings. Fifty-five overs, thirty maidens, 69 runs, none in the second.

He is the control in the experiment. Every argument that Laker’s nineteen was a function of the pitch has to explain why the same pitch, at the same time, in the hands of an international-class spinner bowling thirty maidens in fifty-five overs, produced nothing at all.

And every argument that it was pure skill has to explain why Laker took ten for 53 on that surface and 174 wickets in the rest of his 46-Test career.

The card holds both figures side by side and settles neither.

The extras column

Australia’s first innings contains no extras at all. None.

Eighty-four all out, forty overs and four balls, and not a bye, leg bye, wide or no-ball among them. Godfrey Evans kept to two spinners turning it square for thirty overs and four balls and conceded nothing.

What was never said

What the two of them talked about between overs.

They were Surrey team-mates who bowled in tandem for a decade and their relationship was known to be difficult. Lock is reported to have got angrier as the second innings went on, dropping shorter and faster and trying to force it.

Neither man wrote an account of that afternoon from the other’s end. Laker’s autobiography is about his own bowling, which is reasonable, and Lock never produced one.

Nineteen for 90 and one for 106 are the two most eloquent lines on the scorecard and they are twenty-two yards apart.

••••••

No. 3 in Unrepeatable, a series of 22.

NextNine hundred and seventy minutes