In Test cricket’s early years, wicketkeeping was the preserve of specialists. ‘Sticky wickets’, when pitches dried out after being left uncovered while it rained, behaved erratically; standing up to spinners in such conditions demanded profound skill, especially with no helmets or even adequate gloves to offer protection. Jack Blackham, Australia’s keeper in the inaugural Test match in 1877, had simple advice for would-be keepers: “Give it up and take on bowling.”
The mental and physical arduousness of keeping wicket, and maintaining concentration ball after ball in an age of high over rates, meant that picking keepers partly for their batting was seen as a risk that could jeopardise their primary skill.
Conventional wisdom had it that sides should pick the best wicketkeeper, and then worry about where they batted. Herbert Strudwick played 28 Tests for England from 1910-26; he averaged 7.9, batting at No11 in more than half of them.
In keeping with these traditions, Duckworth was preferred in all five Ashes Tests in 1928/29. The decision was vindicated by England’s 4-1 series victory; Duckworth contributed 13 catches and one stumping. But, for all his fighting qualities with the bat, Duckworth often batted at 11 for England; he averaged 14.6 in his 24 Tests, batting in last place in nine Tests.
These limitations led to Duckworth’s eventual usurpation as England wicketkeeper. Ames, just as Fender wrote, was universally acclaimed as Duckworth’s inferior behind the stumps. But he opened up new possibilities in front of them.
The summer after the victorious Ashes tour, Ames made his Test debut. He batted at No8, and made a duck. The following winter, Ames made two centuries, from five – doubling the total number of hundreds scored by all Test keepers – during a 1-1 draw in West Indies. It was the prelude to a remarkable Test career: Ames scored eight centuries while keeping, and averaged 40.6. He made runs not just with unprecedented reliability for a keeper, but with speed, stylishly driving over the infield: Ames twice won the Walter Lawrence Trophy, for the fastest century in an English summer.
No one ever lauded Ames as Duckworth’s equal behind the stumps – he allowed four more byes per Test – but he became a reliable keeper and made England a more balanced side.
In 1952, the first edition of the MCC Cricket Coaching Book proclaimed that: “It can therefore be laid down as an absolute principle in team selection that the best wicketkeeper, irrespective of all other considerations, must always be chosen…”
But a generation earlier, England already believed that they were not always best-served by picking their best keeper. The debate about whether they should do so has rarely stopped since.
‘Wicketkeepers are very rarely selected for England unless they can bat’
When Ames played his final Test in 1939, he had scored eight of the 11 centuries by Test keepers. After his retirement, Ames came to look less like a harbinger of what was to come than an extraordinary one-off. In the 1950s, all keepers in Tests averaged just 20.6 – only one run more than in the 1920s.
Godfrey Evans, who played 91 Tests for England from 1946-59, averaged almost exactly this figure: a significant leap from Strudwick and Duckworth, but only half of Ames. In the 1954/55 Ashes, Evans only averaged 17, but made one of the series’ most telling contributions. On the fifth morning at Melbourne, with the series locked at 1-1, Australia needed 165 more runs to win, with eight wickets in hand. Neil Harvey, the great Australian batsman, was at the crease facing Frank Tyson, who bowled as quickly that series as perhaps any England bowler in Test history. Tyson’s tour diary, In The Eye of the Typhoon, takes up the story:
When the left-hander glanced it off the full face of the bat, he must have thought that it was a certain four. But he had reckoned without wicketkeeper Godfrey Evans, who danced a few steps to his right and flung himself at the ball like a circus acrobat. He gathered in the most extraordinary wicketkeeper’s catch I have ever seen, directly in front of Colin Cowdrey, who was fielding very wide of the pitch at leg slip! It was the catch which turned the game –perhaps the series.