Brief Candles 2: More One-Match Wonders
About this ebook
Most earn their inclusion because of an unusual achievement that they recorded during their brief careers at that level. So you can read here about the five cricketers who played an innings in the 90s in their debut game, and the five who shared in century partnerships on debut when batting at number 11 - and yet none of them was ever picked again.
Others are included because of something that happened to them during their one-and-only first-class matches - like the three cricketers who were no-balled for throwing on their debuts, whereupon they disappeared from the first-class game altogether.
Another two earn their appearance because of a pair of unhappy coincidences: though unrelated they shared the same unusual surname, and both met their deaths in the most tragic of circumstances. And finally there’s the clergyman who played his only first-class match when just six months short of his 60th birthday.
Brief Candles 2 explores the lives of these and some others who deserve to be better remembered for their unusual, if very short, contributions to the history of the first-class game.
About the author
Keith Walmsley is a retired chartered town planner with a lifelong interest in cricket’s more esoteric facts and figures. He has been a member of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians since the mid-1970s, and has recently completed 20 years as the Statistical Officer of The Cricket Society.
Previous publications have included three editions of Mosts Without in Test Cricket and the ACS Famous Cricketers volume on long-time hero Clem Hill, as well as the first volume of ‘Brief Candles’. He is a longstanding QPR supporter, a long-crouching former wicket-keeper in the Reading Midweek League, and a long-sitting cellist in the Reading Symphony Orchestra. To the surprise of some, he does not own an anorak.
