Eric's Warwickshire

This is not surprising when you consider that the delivery in question was a perfectly pitched googly which bowled Don Bradman for nought in his last Test innings. But Eric Hollies took 2,322 other wickets in his career, 145 of them in 1951 when Warwickshire won the second County Championship in their history with what their captain H E (Tom) Dollery described as “an extraordinary team of ordinary players.”

Warwickshire’s achievement was noteworthy for far more than one of cricket’s earliest soundbites. Dollery was the first professional to skipper a Championship-winning county and his squad comprised 15 players, only one of which, Esmond Lewis, was an amateur. In any case Lewis played only one match and even that took place after the title had been decided at Scarborough, where Yorkshire lost to Worcestershire by eight runs in mid-August.

No one could doubt the merit of the new Champions. Warwickshire took over the leadership of the table on June 1 and never surrendered it. Only after matters were decided did Dollery’s men relax a little, losing to Essex at Clacton and drawing their final two rain-affected games. For most of the season they were a tightly-knit, tightly-focused bunch of professional players.