ROY KILNER

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 13, 16 January 1925, Page 7

ROY KILNER

' Roy Kilner, who to-day takes his place for the first time during the tour in a Test match is now nearly 35 years of age, and like many others, has suffered as a result of the war years. Since th» 1923 season, however, he has been marked for Test match honours. He comes of a family of cricketers, the best knownof whom, apart from himself and his brother Norman,' being his uncle, Irving Washington, who was on the hi"-h road to fame as a left-handed : batsman for Yorkshire when a severe illness cut his career short in 1902. Eoy Kilner qualified for first-class cricket by a, course of training with Yorkshire's second eleven, and was allocated by the •committees to the Harrogate Club. He was first seen in the Yorkshire eleven m the season of 1911. Tried in seven matches lie showed but little" promise, but in the following season he made a great advance, playing in 23 games and getting an average of 22. He wentright ahead for the county as a batsman in 1913-14, but his bowling, which has since done much more to make him famous, is a post-war product. During the Great War he served in the Leeds and Bradford Regiment, and was wounded in the right wrist preparatory to the onslaught on Lenß on Ist July, 1916. He might have remained only "a batsman and fieldsman, but for the loss of M. W. Booth and the subsequent death of A. Drake in 1919, followed by the retirement of Georga Hirst, which all combined to bring about a new situation in Yorkshire cricket. Roy Kilner set to work to become a first-class bowler, and quickly made his mark.- In 1919 he took 38 wickets in county cricket, with' a good average, and it. was not until 1922 that he really became considered as being in the first flight of English bowlers. Leaving his previous form far behind he had a record of 101 wickets in county matches at a cost of less than 14i runs each. In the next season he took 139. wickets for Yorkshire in county games, with the remarkable average of 11.41, and was third on the list of batting averages with 35.18. Last season he was at the head of the bowling averages for the whole of England in county matches with 140 wickets for 12.54 rung, Macaulay, Rhodes,- and Parkin being his nearest attendants. His most startling, and probably his best ] performance with the ball, was in the • Surrey match at Leeds in 1923, when in the last innings he took six wickets for 22 runs, winning a game that at the tea interval' seemed hopelessly lost. At the; present time lie is admitted to bo one of the best all-round cricketers in England, and his hard work as a bowler has in no way affected either his batting or fielding. "A s a left-handed slow bowler," says Wisden's Cricketers' Almanack, "he has. apart from his fine spin and accuracy of lemrth, the sovereign rnmlitv of imagination. He 1b al\yay;i thinking out new ways of bcatins

he so often bowls over the wicket, this device, rarely adopted by left-handers, being rery valuable as a contrast to Rhodes when the two men aie "together.'.' Devoted to the game, and blessed with/ a cheery temperament, Roy Kilner is quite a personality among present-day players. -"". '