Sydney Barnes: 189 Test wickets in 27 matches
A league cricketer who barely played county cricket took 189 wickets in only 27 Tests for England, at an average many historians still rank as the finest of anyone who has played the game. He did it largely on his own terms, and largely away from Lord's.
A league bowler
Sydney Barnes played only a handful of full seasons of county cricket in his entire career, for Warwickshire and later Lancashire, preferring instead the better pay and lighter workload of league cricket in the Midlands and the north of England. It was an unusual path for a Test bowler of his era, when the leading players were expected to build their reputations through the county championship, and it meant Barnes came to national attention relatively late and remained, throughout his career, something of an outsider to the cricket establishment. He was nearly 28 when he was picked for the England tour of Australia in 1901-02, a chance that arrived almost by accident after the tour selectors needed a bowler at short notice.
Sydney, 1901
Barnes made his Test debut in the first Test of that tour, at the Sydney Cricket Ground, and took 6 wickets in the match on a ground and against a side that gave no favours to a newcomer, a baptism that would have unsettled a bowler with a more conventional grounding in the county game. It was an immediate sign of what his combination of pace, accuracy and unusually pronounced finger-spin, generating movement in both directions off a length that other fast-medium bowlers of the era could not reproduce, could do even against the best batters in the world. From that debut on, Barnes was, whenever he chose to make himself available, first choice for England.
The Triangular Tournament
In 1912, England hosted South Africa and Australia in the Triangular Tournament, a rare attempt at a three-way international series played entirely in English conditions. Against South Africa at the Kennington Oval, on a pitch affected by rain, Barnes took 8 for 29, part of his best five innings in the CricArcade archive, and England won by an innings. It was one of several devastating spells he produced against South African batting that year and the year after, conditions and opposition that, for reasons debated ever since, brought out some of the most one-sided bowling performances of his career.
Seventeen at the Wanderers
The peak of that dominance came on the tour of South Africa that followed, in the second Test at the Old Wanderers in Johannesburg in 1913, on a matting pitch that suited his kind of bowling even more than the grass surfaces of England and Australia had. Barnes took 9 for 103 in the first innings and 8 for 56 in the second, 17 wickets in the match, still among the best match bowling figures recorded by anyone in Test history and the best ever returned by an England bowler. South Africa's batting had no real answer to him across either innings, and England won comfortably. Across that series as a whole Barnes took 49 wickets in four Tests, a number that has never been approached by any bowler in a Test series of that length.
A bowler on his own terms
Barnes was as well known for his independence as for his bowling. He negotiated his own terms with county and touring sides, turned down tours when the pay or conditions did not suit him, and left Lancashire over a pay dispute at the height of his powers, choosing league cricket instead even though it meant fewer chances to add to his Test record. Selectors and administrators of the era, used to professionals accepting whatever terms they were offered, found him difficult to manage precisely because he was prepared to say no, and more than one tour selection meeting is recorded as having stalled over whether Barnes could be persuaded to travel at all. That willingness to walk away from the game's establishment on his own terms meant his Test career, remarkable as it was, represents only a fraction of the wickets he took across a bowling life that ran deep into his fifties in league and minor cricket, long after most contemporaries had retired.
Durban, and after
Barnes played his last Test against South Africa at Lord's, Durban, in February 1914, taking 7 for 56, a Test-ending performance as sharp as almost anything from earlier in his career. The First World War then ended any prospect of further Tests while he was still near his best, and Barnes never played international cricket again, choosing to continue instead in league and minor county cricket into old age. His 189 wickets from only 27 Tests, at an average of 16.43, left a strike rate and cost per wicket that few bowlers before or since have matched over a comparable body of work, and it is why historians who compare eras still routinely place him among the best two or three bowlers the game has produced.
The numbers
The CricArcade archive, built from Barnes's 27 Test scorecards, records 189 wickets at 16.43, with 24 five-wicket innings and 7 ten-wicket matches from just 39 innings with the ball, an extraordinary concentration of big hauls. He took more wickets against Australia, 106 at 21.58 in 20 Tests, than any other opponent, but his figures against South Africa were considerably cheaper, 83 wickets at 9.86 in only 7 Tests. He was more economical at home than away, 63 wickets at 13.38 in 10 Tests in England against 126 wickets at 17.96 in 17 Tests abroad, though his most destructive spells, the Oval in 1912 and the Wanderers in 1913, both came in different conditions again. England won 13 of the 27 Tests Barnes played, lost 9 and drew 5. He was a genuine tail-ender with the bat, batting at nine, ten or eleven in every one of his 39 innings, with a highest score of 38 not out.
Sources
- CricArcade player page: full career record, best bowling and scorecard links
- ESPNcricinfo: Sydney Barnes player profile and Test career statistics
- Wisden Cricketers' Almanack: the 1912 Triangular Tournament and 1913-14 South Africa tour reports
- Wikipedia: Sydney Barnes (cricketer)