The Strangest Cricket Quiz Book

By Ian Allen

All the fun of Portico's bestselling Strangest series, now in quiz form!

Test your cricket knowledge with this handy book, packed with fun and challenging quiz questions based around the weirdest events from more than a century of cricketing history.

Quiz categories include:

Freak weather conditions

Bad ball behaviour

Streakers

Time for tea

The Ashes

Cricket's great eccentrics

Village green shenanigans

Cricket quotations

Whether you're testing your friends, practising for pub quizzes or just reading it in an armchair, this book will take your cricket knowledge to a whole new level.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781911622413

Ian Allen

Ian Allen is the compiler of several joke books and a cricket quiz book, and has been a member of the National Trust for decades. He loves the wide range of properties and the epic sweep of the landscape of the Trust, but is even more interested in the quirky stories that lie behind the history.

Book preview

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 LAMENTABLE EFFORTS

2 MULTIPLE-CHOICE MADNESS

3 ABNORMAL ASHES

4 IT’S NOT CRICKET!

5 RELUCTANT RECORD-BREAKERS

6 BRILLIANT AND BONKERS BOWLERS (1)

7 BRILLIANT AND BONKERS BATSMEN (1)

8 WHO SAID?

9 MISCELLANEOUS STRANGENESS (1)

10 BIZARRE BOOK TITLES

11 STRANGE GOINGS-ON AT THEVILLAGE GREEN

12 WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

13 ODI? OH DEAR ...

14 COUNTY CRICKET

15 DUCKS GALORE!

16 STRANGE SAYINGS

17 MISCELLANEOUS STRANGENESS (2)

18 HISTORY MAKERS

19 DAFT DESCRIPTIONS

20 VENTURING OUTSIDE FIRST-CLASS CRICKET

21 WHAT’S IN A NAME?

22 BEYOND THE BOUNDARY

23 BRILLIANT AND BONKERS BATSMEN (2)

24 STRANGE RULES AND DUMB DISMISSALS

25 BRILLIANT AND BONKERS BOWLERS (2)

THE ANSWERS

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to The Strangest Cricket Quiz Book. I consider myself fortunate to have been given the opportunity to write this book, as the original Cricket’s Strangest Matches (and several more of the Strangest series) was written by the estimable and prolific Andrew Ward. But here he is the victim of his own success, and while he is writing The Strangest Football Quiz Book, I have been lucky enough to be working on the cricketing equivalent. I have drawn on Andrew’s fascinating book for about a third of the questions that follow, but have trawled cricket archives, libraries and websites for the remainder. Being free of the limitation of strange ‘matches’ has at least allowed me to include random moments of weirdness that have occurred both on and off the pitch.

Cricket, perhaps more than any other sport, lends itself to statistics – scores, bowling figures, partnerships, methods of dismissal etc. – and it seems almost every day a statistic emerges to make you shake your head in amazement: there are two questions in the book about England’s recent Test series with India, and I write this introduction having just heard of Durham’s amazing feat on 19 September 2018 of beating their previous record lowest County Championship score not once but twice in one day, when scoring 61 and 66 against Leicestershire. That would certainly have made the cut had I been writing the book a month later.

Naturally there is a focus on the extremes of the game at the highest level around the world: the biggest Test scores, feats of wicket-taking and lamentable performances with bat and ball. But Harold Pinter once said, ‘Drama happens in big cricket matches. But also in small cricket matches.’ So there are questions about county cricket, village cricket, and even some matches that took place far from any recognised venue.

Some of the questions will be of matches and incidents familiar to the keen cricket follower, but some I defy anyone to answer without looking them up – I doubt I’d be able to answer half of them myself, even having compiled them. Rather than an orthodox quiz book, I hope the questions will instead stir fond memories and occasionally astonish you. So you’ll discover who played in the shortest cricket match ever; who was cricket’s worst night watchman; and how a ball of wool caused a Test career to be missed.

And because cricket reflects life, and laughter should be a part of everyone’s life, I hope some of the questions will bring a smile to your face. If a handful of them are less than scrupulously backed up by the history books, I hope you (and Andrew) will forgive me.

‘Cricket is battle and service and sport and art.’

Douglas Jardine

(1900–58)

1

LAMENTABLE EFFORTS

‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’. That’s the motto of the Olympic movement. And, quite frankly, as far as I’m concerned they can keep it. How boring is it just to watch people succeeding all the time? A more apt motto for cricket might be, ‘Oh, God, not again …’ Batting collapses, bowling disasters, fielding cock-ups, they all add to the fabric of cricket’s rich tapestry, and the upside of this is that when good performances do come along, they stand out all the more, like diamonds among the dross.

‘Ah, but you should accentuate the positive,’ they say. Well, not here – not yet at least. Accentuating the negative is far more fun, so let’s kick off with some pretty poor performances.

illustration WHY were Northamptonshire particularly relieved in the 1930s that there was no relegation from the County Championship?

illustration WHAT was strange about Australia’s total of 75 all out against South Africa in 1950?

illustration WHO postponed his wedding in order to represent England at cricket in 1984, and why needn’t he have really bothered?

illustration The tour to England by the West Indies in 1988 became known to English cricket fans as ‘the summer of four …’ WHAT?

illustration WHY did former Aussie captain Ian Chappell suggest that Graham Gooch should bowl spinner Phil Tufnell more, despite his underwhelming figures?

illustration ‘They wouldn’t have got near them with another innings!’ is a cry sometimes heard after a heavy defeat, but on the evidence of their two completed efforts, HOW many innings would Dera Ismail Khan have needed to reach Pakistan Western Railways’ first innings total in 1964?

illustration HOW many Northants batsmen reached double figures in their combined match total of 42 for 18 wickets (they were a man short) against Yorkshire in 1908?

illustration WHO made the lowest score in the County Championship for 76 years when scoring 14 all out in 1983?

illustration HOW much did England lose by when they posted their record low Test innings of 45 all out in 1887?

illustration It’s never nice to get hit in the face by a fast delivery, especially in the days before helmets. In 1961 Gloucestershire captain Tom Pugh had his jaw broken in two places by Northamptonshire paceman David Larter. WHAT added insult to injury, to leave him most definitely shaken and stirred?

THE ANSWERS  illustration 96

2

MULTIPLE-CHOICE MADNESS

As I mentioned in the introduction, the chances of anyone getting all the questions in this book correct is pretty low. So I called to mind the story of the cricketer in a village game who is about to bat and confesses to his captain that he’s overindulged in the pub at lunchtime and can now see three of everything. ‘Don’t worry,’ says his skipper, ‘just hit the middle ball, you’ll be okay.’ The batsman wanders confidently to the middle but is soon heading back to the pavilion after being clean-bowled. ‘I told you to play the middle ball,’ his exasperated captain said. ‘I did,’ came the reply, ‘but I hit it with the wrong bat.’ So I’ll give you a chance with these – if you haven’t a clue you can at least have a guess – just don’t go for the middle one each time.

illustration ‘The most disgusting incident I can recall in the history of cricket.’ WHAT incident was being referred to?

(A) The 1932/33 Bodyline controversy.

(B) The sight of the streaking merchant seaman hurdling the stumps at Lord’s in 1975.

(C) Dennis Lillee hurling his aluminium bat away in a Test match in December 1979.

(D) Something even worse …

illustration WHY was a 3ft (1m) net installed around the boundary at Lord’s for a match between MCC and Notts in 1900?

(A) A new scoring system was being trialled.

(B) To keep sheep off the pitch.

(C) To discourage crowd invasions.

illustration WHEN E.W. Swanton