SPECTATOR SPORT
The 'Doleful Duck'
Frank Keating ALLAN MASSIE led the clamour which followed my dreamy presumption that opening partnerships were not what they used to be. Getting in first a couple of Weeks ago to greet Graham Gooch's hun- dredth 100, I airily mentioned the England captain's 'astonishing' number of 17 open- ing partners in his 99 Tests, and sighed for those golden days of permanence (and Plenty) when Hobbs & Sutcliffe and then Hutton & Washbrook were as immutable at the top of the order as Big Ben's chimes on News at Ten.
Massie dived with relish for his Wisden like a Roger Baird going in at a Murray- field corner flag. He wrote: Gooch's opening partners, yes: but the greater Len had also, by my reckoning, 17 opening partners in fewer Tests: 76, I think, as opener. (He went in lower down in two Tests on Freddie Brown's tour, and against New Zealand in the last Test he played.)
They were: J.H. Parks, Barnett, Edrich, Gim- blett, Fagg, Keeton, Paul Gibb, Washbrook, Robertson, Simpson, Ikin, Lowson, Shep- pard, Kenyon, Watson, Bailey, Graveney.
I was pleased to get 14 of them from memory. I might, with more thought, have got Harold Gimblett (neglected genius: should have gone to Australia in '46). I wouldn't have got Fagg or J.H. Parks. He went in with Parks in his first test against New Zealand in '37, but it could hardly be called a partnership since Len made 0 and 1.
Thus Allan puts any pretensions I might have to being a 'researcher' cruelly in their place. All I can plead is that it is too easily done when you allow yourself to become moist-eyed about the 'grand old days'. How often, for instance, do you hear old roman- tics in their cups yearning for England's soccer forward line of yore — 'Matthews, Mannion, Lawton, Carter and Finney'. Ah, they swear, they saw the quintet cut defences to shreds time without number. In fact, that forward line never once took the field together.
But certainly it is a surprise to realise that (presuming he walks out with either Atherton or Stewart this week in Calcutta) Gooch in his 100th Test match will have opened up with 17 partners, while Hutton in 24 fewer matches faced the new ball with exactly the same number. Indeed, it would have been 18 for Hutton had he got his way in 1954 in Australia. As captain he was very keen to open with the fledgling Cowdrey but the young man at once made himself indispensable in mid-order and Hutton took turns with Simpson, Bailey and Edrich, who each failed miserably, till Graveney went in with Hutton in the fifth at Sydney and scored 111.
That first Test duck of Hutton's was as a debutant against New Zealand at Lord's in 1937. Jack Cowie got him.
Many years later, Sir Leonard told me that nobody had bothered to tell him that `the slope at Lord's were a little bit peculiar, like'.
The following day, Sunday, was one of rest. The sad and bewildered young York- shireman left the Great Eastern Hotel and mooched around London on his own, reck- oning he had ruined his Test career for ever. He wandered up the Strand, and, just past Charing Cross station at the entrance to Trafalgar Square, he thought a visit to a news-and-cartoon cinema might cheer him up.
No sooner had he sat down in the dark and lit a cigarette — than Pathe News burst forth with pictures from every angle of `Hutton's Doleful Duck' at Lord's the day before.
Still, he did better in the second innings. He got 1.
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