Alpha and omega. The beginning and the end. On 1 June 1899, one illustrious international career was coming to an end and another was beginning. WG Grace, the Doctor, was 50 years old when he began the last of his 22 Tests, against Australia (they all were back then) at Trent Bridge. They were troubled times. His 20-year-old daughter, Bessie, had died of typhoid in February and, grieving, he was largely an early-season absentee captain from Gloucestershire, with whom he was in dispute as a result, ultimately resigning the role.
This I know from Richard Tomlinson’s splendid book Amazing Grace, which recounts that Grace’s wounded response to the Gloucestershire committee’s inquiry as to whether he actually intended to play any cricket was to finish by saying the affection in which he held the county of his birth was not matched by that for the committee, which as a body he held in great contempt.
There had been press mutterings, too, about his continued value to the England side, a superstar hanging around too long. “A place may be found for that once great cricketer,” said the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, “still great considering his years, in the first match for sentimental reasons alone.”
Grace was the captain and a senior selector, though. “Why does not Grace retire?” the Yorkshire Evening Post wondered. “Even a man of his extraordinary powers and endurance must drop out of international cricket some day and it would be wiser and more graceful act on his part to do so voluntarily.”
But he did play, opening the batting and making a scrappy 28 and one, and bowling 22 fruitless overs in a drawn match. He was not helped by batting with CB Fry, a magnificent athlete, but one frustrated by Grace’s ponderousness so that “we lost innumerable singles to the off side and I never dared call WG for a second run to the long field. When England fielded, Grace was jeered and booed by the 13,000 crowd. On 10 June, he resigned and retired from international cricket.
Wilfred Rhodes, at the age of 21, took seven wickets in the Test with his slow, left-arm spin and was embarking on a 58-match Test career that would not finish until April 1930, the longest span of all. On his England debut he batted at 10, shared a last-wicket partnership of 130 with RE Foster four years later, a record that stood for seven decades, and eight years on was opening the batting.
It was the longevity of Rhodes’s career, and, discursively, Jimmy Anderson reaching 450 Test wickets at Chester-le-Street over the last weekend and becoming the No1 ranked Test bowler, that got me thinking of something that once entertained us for a short while regarding Middlesex. The challenge was to see how far back we could go in the club’s history with the fewest players – degrees of separation, if you will – each of whom must have played with another to maintain a chain (memory serves it went something like Mark Ramprakash, Mike Gatting, Fred Titmus, Gubby Allen and Joe Murrell, whose first-class career, albeit with Kent initially, began before the turn of the last century and who certainly played against the Doctor (lbw Grace, 2). It is an argument I use (Fred was a fine bowler in 1983 so he must have been in 1949, etc etc) when discussions turn to comparative eras.
Anderson has been playing Test cricket for 13 years, which makes his career the longest among the current England team (his cap number is 613 while James Vince, the latest, is 670). So the exercise now was to see the fewest number of players the total span of whose careers go back to the first Test match, in Melbourne, in March 1877. In theory, before starting, there were several staging posts, one of which was Rhodes, and the other would seem to be Brian Close, who made his England debut against New Zealand towards the end of July 1949, when I was aged one, and in whose final match, the infamous one against West Indies at Old Trafford in 1976, I played.
There are a number of ways to link the whole thing, I found, but none gave me fewer than 10 players. One would go Anderson; Alec Stewart, who made his debut in Kingston in 1990 but played in Anderson’s first match against Zimbabwe at Lord’s in 2003 (it could equally have been Nasser Hussain); and to Graham Gooch, the captain on Stewart’s debut, whose career began with a pair against Australia at Edgbaston in 1975. Although Close’s career thus overlapped Gooch’s, they never played together, so this sequence goes from Gooch to John Edrich (from 1963 to that same Old Trafford match, but who played with Gooch against Australia in 1975); then Close. Next comes Sir Leonard Hutton, whose career straddled the second world war from 1937 to 1955, and preceded by Les Ames, the Kent wicketkeeper batsman, whose 47 Tests began against South Africa in 1929 and ended over the course of 10 March days, a decade on, with the timeless Test in Durban. And so to Rhodes. Ames made 149 of England’s 849 in Kingston when Rhodes played against West Indies in his final match, another timeless Test (this time over nine days and also curtailed because of the need to return to England) during which Andrew Sandham made 325, a record for Tests that stood for all of three months. From Rhodes then to Grace and so back to George Ulyett, who batted at four for England in that inaugural match, and in whose final match, at Lord’s in 1890, Grace got a first-baller.
Amazing Grace: The Man Who Was WG, by Richard Tomlinson, is published by Little, Brown
