England v Australia 4th Test

A turning pitch and a strong side

England went into the fourth Test of the 1956 Ashes at Old Trafford leading the series 1-0, with two matches drawn, and the Manchester pitch was known before a ball was bowled to be helpful to spin. Peter May, England's captain, picked two off spinners of contrasting styles in Jim Laker of Surrey and Tony Lock of Surrey, a pairing that had demolished county opposition for years. May won the toss and chose to bat, giving his own bowlers first use of a surface that everybody expected to deteriorate.

England bat first

England batted with control rather than dominance. Peter Richardson and Colin Cowdrey put on 174 for the first wicket, Richardson going on to make 104 and Cowdrey 80 before both fell within a few overs of each other. David Sheppard, recalled to the side after several years out of the England team and playing what would prove a career-defining innings, came in at three and stayed through the rest of the innings, adding 93 with Peter May, who made 43, and later 62 with the wicketkeeper Godfrey Evans, who made 47. Sheppard was finally out for 113, the ninth wicket to fall, having carried the innings from the fall of the first wicket to almost the very end. England were eventually all out for 459. Ian Johnson, the Australian captain, bowled his off spin for 47 overs and took 4 for 151, and Richie Benaud took two wickets for the same number of overs, figures that showed just how difficult scoring quickly on this pitch already was, even for Australia's own bowlers against England's batting.

Nine for thirty-seven

Australia's first innings turned into one of the most one-sided passages of play in Test history. Jim Laker, bowling into the rough outside the right-handers' leg stump left by the bowlers' footmarks, took 9 for 37 from 16.4 overs. Colin McDonald made 32 and Jim Burke 22, the only Australian batters to reach 20, and the rest of the innings disintegrated around them: three wickets fell with the score stuck on 62, and two more without addition at 73, a batting order simply unable to lay a bat on Laker's off spin. Tony Lock, bowling from the other end into the same conditions, took the remaining wicket, and Australia were all out for just 84, conceding a first-innings lead of 375. Brian Statham and Trevor Bailey, England's two seamers, barely got a bowl, six and four overs between them for a combined 10 runs and no wickets, a sign of how completely the match had already turned into a contest between bat and off spin rather than anything resembling a normal Test innings.

Australia follow on

England enforced the follow-on, sending Australia back in 375 runs behind with more than two full days still to play. It was, on paper, a hopeless position, and Australia's only real hope was to bat out the remaining time on a pitch that Laker and Lock had already shown could be unplayable. Colin McDonald again top-scored, making 89 this time in an innings built across three separate partnerships, first with Ian Craig, who added 38, then with Ken Mackay, and finally a defiant stand of 51 with Richie Benaud that briefly threatened to take the match into a fifth day. But wickets kept falling at the other end, McDonald's own dismissal opening the door for the finish everyone by then expected.

Ten for fifty-three

In the second innings Laker did something that has never been repeated in first-class cricket at Test level: he took all ten wickets to fall, finishing with 10 for 53 from 51.2 overs, a spell that ran on and on through the last day as one Australian batter after another fell to him and nobody at the other end could take a wicket instead. Tony Lock, so effective in the first innings, went wicketless in the second, watching from the other end as his opening partner ran through the whole of the Australian order alone. Combined with his first-innings 9 for 37, Laker's match figures were 19 for 90, the most wickets ever taken by one bowler in a single first-class match. Jim Burke, Richie Benaud and Ray Lindwall were among his victims as Australia were bowled out for 205 in their second innings, and England won by an innings and 170 runs to move 2-0 up in the series.

Lock's lone wicket

Tony Lock, bowling in tandem with Laker throughout the match and just as capable on a helpful pitch, finished with only one wicket in the match for his overs of second-innings bowling, a reminder of how much of what happened at Old Trafford came down to Laker finding the precise length and turn that Lock, bowling faster and flatter, did not quite match that week. Lock was in every sense the junior partner in a pairing that had shared wickets fairly evenly for Surrey and England over several seasons, and it did nothing to diminish his own reputation as one of the best left-arm spinners of his generation; it simply meant the match, and the world record, belonged to his opening partner alone.

A record nobody has matched

Laker's 19 wickets in a match remains, decades on, the standing record in first-class cricket, unmatched by bowler after bowler who has taken all ten wickets in an innings only to fall short of it across the match as a whole, and no other bowler has taken all ten wickets in a Test innings more than once, while Laker managed the feat of taking nine in one innings and all ten in the next inside the very same game. Old Trafford 1956 is still cited as the benchmark whenever a bowler dominates a match on a helpful surface, and the ground itself is still associated with Laker's name whenever Ashes cricket returns there, more than six decades on from that July week. The full scorecard for both innings, over by over, is on this page, and the careers of both sides can be traced on the England and Australia team pages. In The Follow-On you can bowl spin on a helpful pitch yourself and see how close you can get to a spell like Laker's.

Sources

• CricArcade Test archive: the full scorecard, fall of wickets and bowling figures on this page
• ESPNcricinfo: Australia in England 1956, 4th Test scorecard and report
• Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 1957: the tour of England, the fourth Test at Old Trafford