Final Cricket Years
Lancashire's reliance on Pollard lessened during the 1948 season, when his County Championship total of 95 wickets was only eight ahead of the slow left-arm bowler William Roberts. In all matches, he took 116 wickets at an average of 23, and he bowled more overs, close to 1,300, than in any other first-class season.
The following season, though, he bowled 400 fewer overs and took only 73 wickets in all, at the relatively high cost of 28 runs per wicket. The Lancashire team regularly included several new, younger bowlers, and many of them – Roy Tattersall, Malcolm Hilton, Bob Berry – were spin bowlers (though Tattersall started as a swing bowler). Pollard continued to open the bowling and was as accurate as ever, but was less successful than in other seasons. He was given a benefit in August 1949 by Lancashire and picked the match against Derbyshire, which raised £8,035, the third highest total at the time. In 1950, after a few matches with little bowling success, Pollard was dropped, and Lancashire started using Hilton, the fastest of three slow left-arm bowlers, to open the bowling in some matches. At the end of the season, in which Lancashire shared the County Championship title with Surrey, Pollard retired from first-class cricket to move into Lancashire League cricket.
That was not quite the end of the first-class career as in 1952, Pollard played one further match, at the age of 40, for a Commonwealth XI against the Indian touring team. He took three wickets in the match, made two catches and 17 runs.
Read more about this topic: Dick Pollard
Famous quotes containing the words final, cricket and/or years:
“[Man’s] life consists in a relation with all things: stone, earth, trees, flowers, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures, sun, rainbow, children, women, other men. But his greatest and final relation is with the sun.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)