“Successive ducks” not always what it is said to be

In his 2001 Wisden obituary, Holcombe “Hopper” Read, an amateur fast bowler who had a short but successful cricket career in the middle 1930s, was said to have made “eight successive ducks”. Whilst Read was an exceptionally poor batsman — indeed his career average of 3.67 remains the lowest by any Test cricketer ever, and he scored in a mere 22 of his 58 first-class innings in England — it is actually not true that Read ever suffered eight successive ducks, that is, eight consecutive innings in which he was dismissed without scoring.

In fact, no batsman in first-class cricket has ever suffered eight consecutive innings dismissed without scoring, or even seven consecutive innings dismissed without scoring. What Read actually suffered was eight consecutive innings without scoring, but one of these was not out. Six consecutive innings dismissed without scoring has occurred twelve times, although most of these have occurred since 2000 in the subcontinent. There was only one between 1908 and 1986, by Victor Cannings in his last innings of 1957 and first five of 1958.

In contrast to the relatively small records for consecutive ducks, records for consecutive scoreless innings extend to as many as twelve by Mark Robinson — ironically during the “Year of the Bat” in 1990 (due of course not to the quality of the batting but to abysmal English bowling and rigged pitches).  For a long time the record was nine, but Jim Griffiths in the middle 1970s broke the record with ten consecutive scoreless innings over four seasons, and then came Robinson.

What is especially notable is that the two sequences are mostly unrelated to each other, especially the sequences of scoreless innings. Only the following seventeen sequences are in both, of a total of over 150 sequences of at least six scoreless innings:

#	Type	Player	Season(s)
8	Scoreless	C.E. Shreck	2015
6	Ducks		2015
7	Scoreless	I.M. Kidson	1987/1988 - 1988/1989
6	Ducks		1987/1988 - 1988/1989
7	Scoreless	R.R. Richards	2011/2012 - 2012/2013
6	Ducks		2011/2012 - 2012/2013
9	Scoreless	P.L. Garlick	1984
5	Ducks		1984
9	Scoreless	D. Ramnarine	2001/2002
5	Ducks		2001/2002
8	Scoreless	T.S. Parankusam	1938/1939 - 1942/1943
5	Ducks		1939/1940
8	Scoreless	Abdul Ghaffar	2010/2011 - 2011/2012
5	Ducks		2010/2011
7	Scoreless	Raza-ul-Hasan	2021/2022
5	Ducks		2021/2022
6	Scoreless	W. Mead	1901
5	Ducks		1901
6	Scoreless	J.A. Hayes	1954/1955 - 1955/1956
5	Ducks		1954/1955
6	Scoreless	R.W. Hanley	1983/1984
5	Ducks		1983/1984
6	Scoreless	Aaqib Javed	1988/1989 - 1989/1990
5	Ducks		1989/1990
6	Scoreless	S. Javed	2000/2001 - 2001/2002
5	Ducks		2001/2002
6	Scoreless	R.R. Bose	2002/2003 - 2003/2004
5	Ducks		2002/2003 - 2003/2004
6	Scoreless	Umar Farooq	2015/2016 - 2016/2017
5	Ducks		2015/2016 - 2016/2017
6	Scoreless	Mohammad Mudhasir	2017/2018
5	Ducks		2017/2018

What this reflects, of course, is that the very worst batsmen, like Griffiths or Francis McHugh, are unlikely to be out on every visit to the wicket because they frequently to not get the opportunity to be so much as dismissed. Such batsmen are so much a liability that any partner will naturally attempt to prevent them ever giving them the strike if at all possible, which can easily mean they get out themselves. It is true that Ian Kidson, linked above, has probably the most innings (37) of any first-class cricketer with a worse batting average than McHugh, and that but for his stint with Northamptonshire against already very weak English bowling Hanley would have had a higher ratio of wickets to runs in his career than Bhagwat Chandrasekhar or Alf Hall. On the other hand, Walter Mead hit a century against Leicestershire in 1902.

So, the message is to be careful about claims of “successive ducks” — on one occasion, Wisden made a critical mistake!