I am currently writing a book about English and West Indian cricket in the 1930s. As a part of that I collated some statistics from Cricketarchive on test matches played by England from December 1932 to March 1935. You can click on the link below to see the spreadsheet and if you download you should get the "proper" excel version.
Overall it was a successful period for the England side: winning 10 games, drawing 7 and losing 5, but it is noticeable that the record for the first 13 tests when Douglas Jardine was captain (he actually missed the final game of the 1933 West Indies series but was captain again for tour of India) the record is won 8, drawn 4 and lost 1. It always surprises me how much difference a good "leader" makes to performance, or am I just ascribing a human face to noisy statistics?
England selected 41 different players over the 22 matches, evidence of selectoral inconsistency and also because players would often opt out of overseas tours.
I've also recorded each player as an amateur or professional. Of the 242 selections made 73 were amateur, 30% of the total. That is pretty much in line with the amateur percentage in English first class cricket as a whole. However, amateur cricketers made up less than 30% of the elite cricketers of the 1930s. Looking at the 1st class averages for 1933 and 1934 amateur cricketers only took up 7 of the 40 places in the top 10 of the averages for batting and bowling (I've set a minimum runs and wickets criteria but if anything tilted to the amateur.) So perhaps 15 - 20% of the best cricketers were amateurs.
This would suggest some bias toward amateur selections and writing on the England vs West indies series of 1933 there are some specific examples of amateurs who played test matches on sketchy credentials.
Comments
Post a Comment