SPECTATOR SPORT
Daft happenings
Frank Keating
POSSIBLY, history will log that the most bizarre of all the daft happenings for English Test cricket in the summer of 1993 was the one-off hello-and-goodbye of an Irish-Australian who played a single match for England before vanishing faster than he had come, wincing and clutching his back.
Martin McCague left Northern Ireland when he was three for the Aussie outback, was a graduate of the Australian cricket 'academy' and learned his game playing for Western Australia. Noting his birthplace, in desperation England blooded him in the Trent Bridge Test, the very week before Ireland were admitted as full members to the International Cricket Conference. So next year, perhaps, might he become the first Australian to play Test cricket for Ireland?
Meanwhile, he remains the third Irish- man to play for England. The first was Leland Hone, who toured Australia for England with Lord Harris's side in 1878. Then came the grandest of coves, Sir T.C. O'Brien, who played five Tests between 1884 and 1896. Sir Tim is unlikely to join the celestial throng gazing down on Ken- nington this weekend. He played often at the Oval in his dashing youth, then fell out with the committee after a gambling row, and moved to Lord's where he played for Middlesex for many golden summers. One time, years later, his carriage happened to pass the Oval and, a thirst as usual upon him, O'Brien surreptitiously popped in for just the one. Much consternation, and the Surrey secretary was called to point out that the baronet had been blackballed and was no longer a member. 'Oh, it's all right,' Sir Tim replied, pointing to his cowering cockney ostler, 'my man has signed me in!'
O'Brien must have been a heck of a bat. On the strength of two innings against the 1884 Australians, he made the Test side. His epic knock was an undefeated match- winning 100 not out for Middlesex against Yorkshire in 1889. In his last first-class match, aged 52, he made 90 and 111. He boasted he never batted in a 'box'. He lived life as fast as he puffed cheroots and drained the fizz; he sired ten children, and when he died at 87 in 1948 he was the old- est surviving player of an Ashes Test.
That was 99 years after his grandfather, the original 'Sir Tim', as Lord Mayor of Dublin had presented the 'keys' of the city to Queen Victoria on a visit to her 'other island' in 1849. The cricketer returned to his estates in Leinster in 1900. Two years later, he captained an Irish 'Test' side in England. In losing narrowly to Oxford, O'Brien lit fireworks all over the Parks for 167 not out. Ireland also gave Cambridge a pasting, as they did Dr Grace's London County at Crystal Palace after the Doc had complained of being 'umpired out' by 'excessive Irish appealing'. Thus is it, late o' nights with a last jar in any Irish cricket pavilion, you can hear still this summer, 91 years on, the choral refrain:
Then I joined the XI from Ireland That was captained by T.C. O'Brien. He had leave from His Ex. to sign all cheques, Including the Bollinger wi-en.
We played at the Palace on Wednesday With a Doctor called W.G.
Said he, 'I suppose you gentlemen knows You can't play your dodges with me!'
Leland Hone came and went as fast as Master McCague 115 years later. Lord Harris had heard there was a nifty Irish wicket-keeper bat at Rugby School from the famous cricketing Celts called Hone. So Leland toured (one Test, 2 catches, 19 byes). Harris's info had in fact directed him towards the much more likely brother, Nat Hone, a year ahead, who was already at Cambridge (Leland had never worn the gauntlets till his first and only Test). Nat, they still say, would have been an all-time star stumper for 'England'. But, in Limerick in 1881, a chemist sold him a phial of car- bolic acid, accidentally labelled `senna pods'.
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