Fred Susskind - Test Cricket in England

Test Cricket in England

The 1924 South African tour of England was not successful in terms of winning Tests, with the five-match series lost 3-0 and the other two games ruined by rain. Susskind, however, did well if unspectacularly, playing in all five Tests and making four scores of more than 50. His style, however, attracted criticism. "Though he scored so well, he did not command much admiration," wrote Wisden Cricketers' Almanack in its review of the tour. It went on:

Considering his advantages in height and reach, he nearly always seemed cramped in style, only on rare occasions venturing to let himself go, and no one in the team was so constantly open to the charge of playing with his legs. This was especially noticeable when he was trying to save the Test match at Lord's, appeal after appeal against him for leg before wicket being made before at last the umpire gave him out.

Susskind was omitted from the team for the first few matches, but when he finally appeared in the game against Gloucestershire towards the end of May, he made an unbeaten 69 and from then on he was the regular No 3 batsman in the side. In some matches, he also kept wicket, the South Africans having brought only one full-time wicketkeeper, Tommy Ward.

The Test series started disastrously for the South Africans, bundled out for just 30 in their first innings at Edgbaston by Arthur Gilligan and Maurice Tate. Susskind made 3 in his first Test innings, the only player to be dismissed with the assistance of a fielder, but improved on that with 51 in the second innings when South Africa totalled 390 but still lost by an innings. There was no such disaster in the second Test at Lord's, but the result was the same – an England victory by an innings, this time with the loss of only two wickets in the England innings. After the South Africans lost three wickets for 17 runs in the first innings, Susskind, with 64, put on 112 with Bob Catterall, who made 120, and in the second innings his 53 was the top score. Wisden noted that Susskind displayed "endless patience, staying at the wickets for over two hours and a half". The third Test was marginally less one-sided – South Africa followed on and lost by nine wickets – and Susskind was less successful personally, making 4 and 23. He failed again in the fourth match at Manchester, scoring just 5, but the match was restricted by rain to just two and three-quarters hours on the first day. The fifth and final Test at The Oval was also affected by rain and the first innings were not completed in a drawn match. Susskind made 65, his highest Test score and Wisden noted that he was "patience personified", and contrasted his "steadiness" to Catterall's "brilliancy": Susskind "took three hours and forty minutes to get his invaluable 65," it said.

In the other first-class matches on the tour, Susskind had an unspectacular record, scoring steadily across the summer but not making headlines until the tour was almost over. Then, in late matches, he hit 137 in the match against Surrey between the fourth and fifth Tests. And in a festival match at the end of the season between a team representing the South of England and the South Africans, he hit a second century, making 101 in 130 minutes. On the tour as a whole, he scored 1413 runs at an average of 33.63. The season in England also brought him the only three stumpings of his career and his only first-class wicket, Freddie Calthorpe in the match against Warwickshire.