A History of Cricket at King Edward's School, BIrmingham

71 Chapter Thirteen FIFTY YEARS ON As I said in the Preface, this work was originally written more than fifty years ago, and though I have taken the opportunity to revise it and correct errors, I have not attempted to bring it up to date; nor do I think that it is possible to write the history of cricket at KES over the past half-century in the way that I have done for the first hundred years or so because of the paucity of information in the Chronicle after 1967. For many seasons, particularly in the 1980s, there is almost no information available other than a few scores on Cricket Archive and the averages in Wisden. Since about 1990 the Chronicle has once again attempted to provide a record of the season, though giving us nothing like the full scores and match accounts of a century ago; moreover, over recent years Wisden, for reasons of space, no longer gives proper averages but only the bare essentials. However, in other documents I have compiled match lists and records that cover the period up to 2016, and on the basis of those and other sources it is possible to offer a few final reflections. Chapter 11 suggested that the years 1963 to 1966 might be the beginning of another successful era. This proved to be correct. John Pickering’s side won ten matches in 1967, and the next decade was generally successful, culminating in the winning of ten matches in 1973, 1975 and 1976 under Richard Pope, John Claughton and Francis Watson. The next few years were not quite as good, but another peak was reached in the mid-eighties in the two years when Nick Willetts was captain: his side recorded 11 victories in 1984 and 10 the next year. In the early 1990s KES had cricketers of the calibre of Nick Linehan, Anurag Singh and Mark Wagh, and under Anurag Singh in 1994 there were 13 wins, equalling the record set by Manton’s team in 1891; but the end of this decade was even more successful, with a new record of 14 wins established under the captaincy of Aninrudh Singh (Anurag’s brother) in 2002. There were another five seasons in which there were ten or more wins: 1999, 2003, 2004, 2009 and 2011. However, what is remarkable about the last fifty years is not so much that there have been these particular periods of success; it is that standards have been consistently high. If we take the fifty-year period between 1967 and 2016 as a whole, and deduct the figures for the 13 very successful seasons listed above, we find that over the remaining 37 seasons 195 matches were won, an average of something between five and six wins a season. Comparisons with the pre-war eras are perhaps not useful, because conditions were different and fewer matches were played, but in the generally unsuccessful period between 1957 and 1962 the average number of wins per season was less than three, and even in the successful eras that preceded and followed these years the average number of wins per season was only about seven. Batting standards have continued to rise. Innings totals of over two hundred used to be a rare event, achieved only once or twice a season. Judged by this criterion, scoring was