by Abhishek Mukherjee
There was much more to Bill Voce than being Harold Larwood's partner-in-crime for Nottinghamshire and England. In fact, his Test bowling average (27.88) was the marginally better than Larwood's (28.35).
While he rarely got the choice of ends, his whippy action helped him generate steep bounce off a length and hit the batsman's rib. And now, with Larwood was not playing the match against Somerset at Taunton, Voce got a chance to bowl with the wind behind his back.
Voce peppered No. 10 George Hunt with his trademark rib-crushers. So Hunt switched to a left-hand guard (over half a century before Gavaskar against Karnataka). Somerset scored 300, then secured a 7-run lead.
Somerset did not push for a win. They reached 207/4 when Cecil Charles Coles Case (to my knowledge the only First-Class cricketer with four names, all of which began with the same letter) – commonly known as Box Case – walked out.
Voce was on 299 First-Class wickets when he charged in to bowl the ball in question, so one can understand why he pushed himself that extra bit.
Case had a solid defence, cramped batting style was not the best against someone like Voce. And things certainly did not look too encouraging when Voce opted for leg-theory, taking time to put fielders around the leg.
The ball came for Case faster than the poor man had anticipated. In a hurry to get out of the way, he collapsed in a heap on the stumps.
This was humiliating, but certainly not unheard of. Voce's short-pitched bowling, backed by a packed leg-side field, had greater batsmen in trouble over years. But what followed was probably unprecedented.
Case somehow managed to get up from the ruins and returned to the pavilion. Unfortunately, such was the shock that he clutched a stump, leaving his bat behind.
He did not realise what he had done till Notts captain Arthur Carr came up to him: "Would you mind leaving us that stump and taking your bat instead?"
Case scored 0 and 1 in the match. His subsequent scores against Nottinghamshire read 5, 8, 3, 16, 30, 3, 5, 12, 18, 19, 0, 3, 4, and 19. It might not have been a coincidence.
This happened on 20 June 1930.