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SURREY GREATS - TOM HAYWARD In the words of Neville Cardus, Thomas Walter Hayward “was amongst the most precisely technical and most prolific batsmen of any time in the annals of cricket.” He scored a total of 43,551 first-class runs (36,175 for Surrey - a record second only to that of Sir Jack Hobbs) at an average of 41.79, including 104 centuries and twenty consecutive thousand-run seasons between 1895 and 1914. Essentially a dominant batsman, Hayward was tall and well built with a military moustache and bearing. Never anything less than correct he could score all round the wicket. His chief strokes were the cut and the off-drive, which was executed so delightfully and with such timing that the ball rarely lifted off the ground. With both his father and grandfather having represented the county before him, Tom made his Surrey debut in 1893. Five years later he played his greatest innings - 315 not out against Lancashire at The Oval. When he heard that J.T.Brown of Yorkshire had been given a bonus for making a triple-century that very day, Hayward said that he would get out for a hundred for Surrey in future. Luckily he did not keep his word and the following season Tom scored 273 against Yorkshire, sharing in a world record 448 for the fourth wicket with Bobby Abel. That year he averaged 58.82 and passed 2,000 runs for the first time - a feat that he went on to replicate on nine further occasions.
championship. 116 against Yorkshire at Lord’s - where Surrey played two matches during the early weeks of the War - was his 104th and last. Whilst Hayward is sure of a lasting place among England’s great batsmen, it is not generally known that he enjoyed a certain amount of success as a medium-pace off-break bowler. In 1897 he took 114 wickets at an average of 18.18 in addition to scoring 1,368 runs with the bat and, in 1899, he twice performed the hat-trick. Growing heavy on his feet and slow in the field, he did not return to the
game after the First World War. Tom chose, instead, to return to Cambridge where
he acted as University coach and groundsman at Fenner’s. One of his many pupils
was R.C.Robertson-Glasgow who wrote: “Only once did we persuade him into pads
and, then, for about five minutes he showed enough to remind us of his
greatness.” |
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