Can You Crib At Cricket?

Northern Advocate, 18 May 1949, Page 3

Can You Crib At Cricket?

When young George Smith, 17-year-old captain of the Petone fifth-grade cricket team, bowled a sensational over in a game against Trafalgar ParkStop Out last month, he produced a cricketing enigma. He bowled the perfect over by taking six wickets with six balls. Did he perform a double hat-trick, or would his feat be more correctly described as a quadruple hat-trick? Smith is a medium-paced bowler, who swings the ball either way. He clean-bowled five of his victims in the over with.balls pitched outside the leg stump, after a leg : before appeal had given him his first wicket. An authoritative ruling on the feat is not easy to obtain. The term hattrick appears in “Wisden,” but is not defined, and more notable feats are simply described as “taking four wickets with consecutive balls.” There is no record of more than foui wickets being taken with consecutive deliveries in first-ciass cricket. IN A TEST - MATCH

Only one bowler has performed the hat-trick twice in an England-Aus-tralia test match. It. ’was done £>y T. J. Matthews for Australia at Manchester in 1912.

An unparalleled feat was that of A. E. Trott, who, in his benefit match at Lord’s in 1907, took four wickets with consecutive balls and also performed the hat-trick in the same innings for Middlesex against Somerset. The nearest approach ' in first-class matches to Smith's feat in taking a wicket with every ball of the over occurred in a match between Surrey and England at. the Oval in 1863. In a four-ball over by G. Bennett (England), H, H. Stephenson was

stumped off the first delivery, W. Caffin was fun out off the second, W. E Dowson was bowled by the third ana G. Griffiths was caught off the fourth. Bennett, however, could not claim the distinction of having performed even a single hat-trick. “HARD-KNOCKER’’

Cribbage players would probably suggest that the capturing of three wickets with successive deliveries more than once in an innings or a match, with unsuccessful deliveries in between, is correctly described aS'performing the hat-trick. Followers of the card game would also consider that taking four wickets in succession is a double hat-trick (the second group of three wickets constituting a hat-trick on their own account); taking five in succession is a triple hat-trick; and six in succession a quadruple hat-trick.

Brewer's “Dictionary of Phrase and Fable" describes a.hat.-trick thus; “A hat-trick is taking three wickets at cricket with three successive balls. A bowler who did this used to be entitled to a new hat at the expense of his club.”

Although this definition does not clear up the question, it would seem that if a bowler was presented with a hat, then a century-maker should qualify for a ‘‘hard-knockejr.”