Staples’s Super Score
One of the many joys of cricket research is the steady supply of little nuggets of information that intrigue and engage.
For instance – the scorecard from 1932 that tells us that Arthur Staples once scored nine runs from one delivery!
In the Championship game at Kettering, Staples was batting in Notts first innings and went from 45 to 54 in one hit – what a way to bring up your half century!
The unfortunate Northants bowler was the grandly-named Edward Winchester Clark, more prosaically known as ‘Nobby’ (in that era, most men called Clark were nick-named Nobby but that seems to have fallen out of fashion; we wouldn’t, for instance, recommend trying it with our own Joe Clarke).
According to contemporary reports, Clark was in his sixth over when Staples, who already had a six and a couple of fours to his name, hit a drive that also looked destined for the ropes. But the ball slowed and had to be chased and gathered by the fielder, Jack Timms, allowing time for Staples and his partner Willis Walker to run five.
Timms, presumably frustrated and a bit puffed, threw it back with such vigour that it missed anyone backing up and crossed the boundary on the far side of the field.
Nobby Clark’s reactions are not recorded, which is probably just as well. He was a genuinely quick left arm seamer with a fairly fiery temperament. One report says that he would get angry over even slight problems like broken footholds or missed chances, which possibly accounts for his relatively few Tests at a time when only Larwood could match or beat his pace. One can only imagine his response to conceding a ‘niner’!
Like Bill Voce, Clark was a practitioner of ‘leg theory’ bowling (in the summer of 1932 this had yet to become ‘Bodyline’) but could not match Voce’s talent with the bat. Clark, who took 1-69 and 3-41 in the match, finished his career with 1208 First-Class wickets, 32 of them in his eight Tests.
Clark had joined Northamptonshire as a teenager in 1922 having already played league cricket in Yorkshire. In 1930 the county were in financial difficulties and could have lost their place in the County Championship, so Clark went back to league cricket and had only returned to the Northants ranks earlier in the 1932 season.
Arthur Staples was in 1932 regarded as the best all-rounder in the Notts team, finishing his county career with more than 13,000 runs and 700 wickets. He had a top score of 153no with 12 centuries and 70 half-centuries, one of which was the 67 that included the ‘nine’. He passed 1000 runs in a season seven times; his best season with the ball was in the championship winning side of 1929 when he took 82 wickets at 22.60.
If Arthur was the first – and, to date, the only – batter to score nine from one ball for Nottinghamshire, he was not the first Nottingham batter to do so. Sixty years earlier, in the Players v Gentlemen match at The Oval, Richard Daft also hit a ‘niner’.
Daft, batting at five as the Players were required to follow on, scored nine runs from one ball off a delivery from Isaac Donnithorne Walker (what is it about bowlers conceding nine runs and having unusual middle names?).
Not surprisingly, there are fewer details available for this 1872 game than for the 1932 fixture so we are not sure when and how the nine came about but it is reported that Richard Daft retired hurt on 27 – exhausted by all that extra running, perhaps?
Walker bowled slow right-arm and underarm and was part of the cricketing Walker family that established the ground at Southgate that was for many years the home of Middlesex CCC and still occasionally hosts county matches.
In the game at The Oval, he recovered sufficiently from the ignominy of nine runs from one ball to record 4-51 as The Gentlemen won by nine wickets.
Neither Daft nor Staples hold the record for the most runs scored from one ball – that goes to Sam Wood of Derbyshire who scored 10 from a delivery from Cuthbert Burnup in a match against the MCC at Lord’s in 1900.
In 1900, cricket briefly tried the idea of a net around the boundary…the enclosing of grounds with a net of between two to three feet in height to try to eliminate boundary hits. Any ball becoming lodged in the net would get two in addition to any runs actually run, instead of four. Any hit clearing the net would get three in total.
Thus Wood’s ten only includes two overthrows so we must assume that they ran six, claimed the extra two runs for the netting, and then added the two overthrows. The record, therefore, seems to owe more to that curious and short-lived notion (it didn’t survive more than a few experimental games) than to the batter’s prowess.
So we can regard Richard Daft and Arthur Staples as two of the record holders for scoring nine runs from a single delivery under normal match conditions!
December 2024