High summers

While Sunday’s Test farce reverberated far beyond Surrey’s Oval, that county’s favourite son, veteran Mark Ramprakash, was serenely toasting his achievement in becoming the first English batsman to score 2,000 first-class runs in a summer since he did the very same 11 years ago. Good show. It used to be a routine mark for leading county batsmen. Hobbs did it on 17 occasions, Sutcliffe and Hendren 15. In my boyhood, 2,000 was almost commonplace. Sixty summers ago, for instance, the two grand was posted by Laurie Fishlock, Vijay Merchant, Jack Robertson, Tom Barling, Dennis Brookes and Walter Keeton, with the two Test players back from the war, Denis Compton (2,403) and Cyril Washbrook (2,400) topping the list. The latter, Old Trafford’s rigorous RSM, astonishingly got half the job done inside just three weeks.

An old cricketing friend, John Gibbons — in the 1950s the ‘Typhoon Tyson’ of the Berkshire Gents — sends me some intriguing bumf on Washbrook’s 1946 midsummer

merrymaking: between 26 June and 17 July, 1,021 runs in 12 first-class innings (as many as a modern Test player might manage in all of three months). No sponsored Porsche or Jag doing round-Britain whizzes in the outside lane then, of course, just train or bus or juddering motor-coach up hill and down dale between Manchester, Liverpool, London and Canterbury from Cyril’s Timperley home. In the 21 days between his five centuries and six half-centuries, Washbrook reckoned he spent ‘at least 75 hours sitting in various crowded and uncomfortable conveyances’.

Tougher then? Nowt like a good anniversary to prove it. A century ago, a county player didn’t even have Cyril’s choice of transport. Only the train took the strain. Which makes George Hirst’s still imperishable 1906 chart-toppers all the more astounding.