The ultimate cricket quiz

No Cricket, despite the lovely May weather we had. But here’s a little quiz to help pass time you might have spent following county scores on local radio or your computer.

Please submit entries to Alastair Benn on alastair@reaction.life by Tuesday noon.

The highest score wins a copy of 2019 Wisden.

In the event of a draw, I’ll set a tie-breaker.

1. Which England captain was born in…?

a) Milan

b) Lima

c) Bellshill

d) Sydney

e) Bombay

2. Which England captain…?

a) became Governor of Bengal

b) became a Church of England bishop

c) held the World record for the long-jump

d) was drowned at sea

e) was made a life peer

3. A Hundred Hundreds

a) Who was the first man to score a hundred centuries?

b) Who was the last man to do this?

c) Who scored a hundred centuries without playing for an English county?

d) Who scored more than a hundred centuries after the age of forty?

e) Who was the last player to score 150 centuries?

4. And other Sports

a) Which New Zealand batsman played fly-half for England?

b) Who was the last man to be on the winning side in both The Ashes and a FA Cup Final?

c) Who played cricket for Lancashire, rugby for Scotland and football for Manchester City?

d) Who was the last man to play Test Cricket and Rugby for England?

e) Who played Rugby for Wales and at cricket captained his county to win the County Championship?

5. Yorkshire

a) Who was the first overseas star to play for Yorkshire when the club no longer required players to have been born in the county?

b) Which of these Yorkshire players who captained England was not born in Yorkshire: Norman Yardley, Brian Close, Geoffrey Boycott, Michael Vaughan, Joe Root?

c) Which Yorkshireman captained England only after he had left Yorkshire to play for another county?

d) Who captained Yorkshire when they beat Australia in 1968?

e) Name two fathers-and-sons who played for both Yorkshire and England.

6. The Don

a) From which table of records did Wisden drop Bradman this year?

b) Which was the only Test Match Ground in England at which Bradman didn’t make a Test hundred?

c) Which English bowler twice dismissed Bradman for a Test match duck?

d) When and by whom was Bradman’s name linked with Hitler?

e) Where did Bradman make his last hundred in Britain? (Clue: it wasn’t a
first-class match.)

7. West Indians

a) Whose record did Gary Sobers break in Jamaica in 1958

b) Who was acclaimed as “The Black Bradman”?

c) Whose throw at Brisbane in December 1960 ran out the last Australian batsman so that the Test ended in a tie?

d) Who were the three W’s?

e) Who were “these two little friends of mine”? (Clue: a calypso
first heard at Lord’s.)

8. More West Indians

For which English county did the following play?

a) Gary Sobers

b) Rohan Kanhai

c) Malcolm Marshall

d) Vivian Richards

e) Sylvester Clarke

9. Who should you associate with?

a) 10 for 10

b) 499 run out

c) One run in a match-winning stand of 76

d) A double century scored as a night-watchman

e) A dropped slip catch which enabled Kevin Pieterson to score 158 and secure The Ashes in 2005

10. Miscellaneous

a) Who scored a hundred for England against Australia and later captained India?

b) Who was the first professional cricketer to be made a Life Peer?

c) What do Denis Compton and David Warner have in common?

d) What made J W Burke the odd-man out at Old Trafford in 1956?

e) Whose Test career spanned 27 years though he never made a Test hundred or took five wickets in an innings?

11. Writers and Commentators

a) Who doubled as his paper’s Cricket Correspondent and Music Critic?

b) Which playwright and poet saw “Len Hutton in his prime,/Another time, another time”?

c) Which journalist and Test Match Special commentator was President of the Oxford Union, a Liberal Parliamentary candidate and a Baptist lay preacher?

d) Which England fast bowler had a book of his poems published?

e) Which TMS commentator was a poet, a friend of Dylan Thomas and a producer of poetry programmes for the BBC Third Programme?

12. Cricket and Politics

a) Which former England captain stood as a Conservative candidate against the future Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in Cardiff in 1964?

b) Which future Prime Minister toured Argentina with the MCC?

c) Which fast bowler became Minister of Tourism in Barbados?

d) Which future Tory Cabinet Minister played in the Charterhouse XI with Peter May?

e) Which Prime Minister agreed to the installation of a teleprinter in Downing Street only when he was told it would allow him to follow the cricket scores?

13: Opening Partnerships

Complete the following pairs (Batsmen)

a) Hobbs and…

b) Hutton and…

c) Greenidge and…

d) Strauss and…

e) Woodfull and…

14. Complete the following pairs (bowlers)

a) Gregory and…

b) Larwood and…

c) Lindwall and…

d) Hall and…

e) Lillee and…

(There are acceptable alternative answers to some of questions 13 and 14)

15. Public Schools

a) Who was the last Etonian to captain England?

b) Who was the last Wykehamist to captain a Test team?

c) Which Prime Minister’s son played at Lord’s for Harrow against Eton?

d) For which future England captain did Winston Churchill fag at Harrow?

e) Which inflexible Wykehamist captained an Ashes-winning team?

16. Family Connections

a) Three generations of Headleys played Test cricket. Who and for whom?

b) What did Alec Bedser and Steve Waugh have in common?

c) How many of the Edrich brothers played county cricket in the ten years after the 1939-45 war?

d) What linked Victor Richardson to the Chappell brothers?

e) Which England opening batsman of the 1980s has a son in the England team today?

17. Miscellaneous again

a) Who is the last English batsman to have scored a Test century after the age of forty?

b) How old was W G Grace when he made a thousand runs in May?

c) Who played his first Test in 1899 and his last in 1930?

d) Who was the last Englishman to score three centuries in an Ashes series?

e) Who is credited with being the first to bowl a googly?

18. Nicknames or sobriquets

Who is or was:

a) The Croucher

b) Beefy

c) The Typhoon

d) Lol

e) The Old Bald Blighter

19. What is…?

a) DRS

b) A Harrow cut

c) A Chinaman (now out of date)

d) A Yorker

e) A Ramp

20. Who captained England to win The Ashes in Australia in…?

a) 1928-9

b) 1932-3

c) 1954-5

d) 1970-1