Personalities In N.Z. Sport

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 803, 25 October 1929, Page 14

Personalities In N.Z. Sport

25 Years of Cricket and Still Going Strong

TO have never missed an engagement with his club for 25 years, played representative cricket almost continuously, for 20 years, scored 29 centuries, and amassed a grand total of 12,144 runs in Auckland club, representative and New Zealand cricket is the unique record of Ernie Ilorspool, the well-known Grafton cricketer, who on Saturday last scored the first century in Auckland for the 1929-30 season.

His is a record which must stand very high in the annals of New Zealand cricket. Uorspool commenced his long career in the 1903-4 season, when he played for the Grafton third-grade team while still at the Grafton Public School. He did well that season, and spent the first half of the next season in the second grade, after which he went up to *the firsts, where he has played ever since, missing only ono Saturday (owing to a family bereavement last year) in all those years. In the 1909-10 season, he won his place in the Auckland representative side and with the exception of the season before last (when he was recovering from an illness) he has played every year since then. In his first innings in representative cricket for Auckland against Otago he opened with “Chummy” If emus and scored 36. Besides Hemus, the giants of cricket in Auckland in those days were W. Brooke-Smith, A. Haddon, A. E. Rolf (coach) and Cliff. Of that band, only. Ilorspool and Brooke-Smith are still playing, and it is some years now since BrookeSmith was an Auckland rep. “Tim” Sloman. also of Grafton, began his cricket career the year after Ilorspool, and the pair were familiarly known as the “Grafton Twins.” Sloman this season has announced his retirement, however. Against Wellington in 1914, Horspool made 113—his . highest score in interprovincial cricket, although in club games he has reached 225, against Eden, and 179, against Ponsonby, at different times. Although he has a record in club cricket probably second to none in the Dominion, Horspool has played for New Zealand on only one occasion, in 1913-14 against an Australian team which included Victor Trumper and Dr. Dolling. He scored 21. He has never toured with New Zealand teams and on at least two occasions was unlucky not to find a place in teams for Australia-—in 1914 in the side which included N. C. Sned-

den, Ilemus and Somerville, of Auckland, and in 1924 when Allcott, Dacre and Gillespie of Auckland visited the Commonwealth. In the 1925-26 season, he scored 143 for Auckland against the Victorian tourists. Horspool has seen so much cricket in his long career that it is hard for him to single out what he considers was his best performance. On one occasion, when a team from the senior clubs of the Auckland Cricket Association played the Wednesday representatives he ran up 183 in one and aquarter hours! That score included 12 sixes (three in successive scoring shots) and 19 fours. He has played on an average nine or ten club matches a season for the past 25 years, so that he has made well over* 200 appearances for Grafton. In recent years Horspool has bowled quite a lot in club cricket, and in his earlier days was a fine out-field. He now fields at mid-off, and has proved himself a capable emergency wicketkeeper, on one occasion relieving Rowntree in a representative game. Years ago, Horspool was a senior grade Soccer player for the Carlton Club, but later took up hockey. Till three years ago he played for Mount Eden, and on one occasion was selected to tour with the Auckland hockey representatives. He could not travel, however. Tho Oraftonian’s best club cricket season was 1917-18,. when he scored 1.058 runs —probably a record for New Zealand. Last season he did not score a century in club games, going into the nineties on several occasions, but this year he has stepped off the mark early by getting there in his first match. Despite his long cricket career Horspool is by no means an old cricketer in years. He has some years to go yet before his fortieth summer is signalled. He puts his success down to the coaching he received by “Sammy” Jones, the old Australian international, who has done much good work for the boys of the Auckland Grammar School, and to practice, practice, and still more practice!

a Canterbury and New Zealand representative, and later as an administrator of the game, is now giving up four evenings a week to coach Canterbury cricketers. And Charles Macartney, famous ex-Australian international, is seen often on the Sydney Cricket Ground at 5 o’clock in the morning coaching the younger generation.