1933
The schoolmaster
Charles Marriott took eleven wickets in his only Test match. It is the best return anybody has produced in a career one match long, and he was never picked again.
The last man out in England’s innings at the Oval in August 1933 was a schoolmaster who had never played a Test match. He was bowled by Manny Martindale for nought.
Charles Marriott was thirty-seven. He then took the ball.
First innings
England had made 312 on the opening day. West Indies replied and were 44 for three when Marriott bowled to George Headley, who was the best batsman in the world outside Australia and arguably in it.
Headley was stumped by Les Ames for 9.
Cyril Merry was bowled. Jackie Grant, the captain, was bowled. Vincent Valentine was caught at square leg. Herman Griffith was stumped to end the innings.
Marriott’s figures were 11.5–2–37–5. West Indies were all out for 100 and followed on.
Full scorecard: England v West Indies, 3rd Test, The Oval, 12–15 August 1933 →
Second innings
They batted better the second time. Clifford Roach made 56 from 45 minutes with five fours and a six, and West Indies were 77 for none.
Marriott had Roach leg before. Then Ben Sealey bowled, Oscar Da Costa bowled, Puss Achong caught behind, Valentine caught, and Griffith caught and bowled to finish it.
Twenty-nine overs and two balls, six maidens, 59 runs, six wickets.
England won by an innings and 17 runs inside three playing days, with a Sunday rest day in the middle of them.
The ledger
Eleven wickets for 96. It is the best match analysis anybody has recorded in the only Test of his life, and it is not close.
His complete Test career reads: one match, one innings, nought runs, 41.1 overs, eight maidens, 96 runs, eleven wickets, average 8.72.
Nobody in the history of the game has finished with a Test bowling average that low while having taken ten wickets or more, because almost nobody has taken ten wickets and then stopped.
What the record does not say
Why he stopped.
There is no injury on the card. He was not dropped mid-series, because this was the third and final Test of the summer. England toured India that winter and took him, and he did not play in any of the three Tests.
The usual explanations offered are that he was thirty-seven, that he was a leg-spinner in an era when England had several, that he taught full time and was available only in the school holidays, and that his fielding was a standing joke among people who had watched him try it.
Each of those is plausible. None of them is written down as the reason by anybody who was in the room when the next side was picked, and there is no minute of a selection meeting from 1933 that anyone has produced.
Two other men also debuted
Charlie Barnett played twenty Tests and was 98 not out at lunch on the first day at Trent Bridge in 1938.
Ben Sealey, of Trinidad, played this one and no others. So the same scorecard carries two players whose entire international careers are contained in it, and only one of them did anything anybody remembers.
What it is like to be a record
Marriott lived until 1966 and wrote a book about leg-spin bowling. He spent thirty-three years as the answer to a trivia question, which is a strange way to be remembered by a sport you were briefly the best in the world at.
The card is complete and it is unhelpful, which is the pattern. Every ball he bowled is accounted for. Every wicket has a mode of dismissal against it. The umpires were Frank Chester and Joe Hardstaff, the ground was the Oval, the match was Test number 229.
What is missing is the one line nobody thought to write: what the selectors said to each other about the schoolmaster who had just taken eleven for 96.
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