Francis Prest McHugh (15 November 1925
– 21 February 2018) was an English
first-class cricket
First-class cricket, along with List A cricket and Twenty20 cricket, is one of the highest-standard forms of cricket. A first-class match is of three or more days scheduled duration between two sides of eleven players each and is officially adju ...
er, who played three games for
Yorkshire County Cricket Club
Yorkshire County Cricket Club is a professional Cricket club based in Yorkshire, England. The team competes in the County Championship, the top tier of English First-class cricket. Nicknamed "Vikings". Yorkshire also competes in T20 Blast, O ...
in 1949,
and 92 matches for
Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire ( , ; abbreviated Glos.) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by Herefordshire to the north-west, Worcestershire to the north, Warwickshire to the north-east, Oxfordshire ...
from 1952 to 1956.
A right arm fast medium bowler, he took 276 wickets at an
average
In colloquial, ordinary language, an average is a single number or value that best represents a set of data. The type of average taken as most typically representative of a list of numbers is the arithmetic mean the sum of the numbers divided by ...
of 24.84, with a best of 7 for 32 for Gloucestershire against his native county. He took
five wickets in an innings
In cricket, a five-wicket haul (also known as a "five–for" or "fifer") occurs when a bowler takes five or more wickets in a single innings. This is regarded by critics as a notable achievement, equivalent to a century from a batter.
Taking ...
fifteen times, and
ten wickets in a match
In cricket, a ten-wicket haul occurs when a bowler takes ten wickets in either a single innings or across both innings of a two-innings match. The phrase ten wickets in a match is also used.
Taking ten wickets in a match at Lord's earns the bow ...
on four occasions.
Initially McHugh was a distinctly fast bowler who came into the Yorkshire team with a major injury to
Ron Aspinall
Ronald Aspinall (26 October 1918 – 16 August 1999) was an English cricketer, who played for Yorkshire, and a cricket umpire.
Life and career
Aspinall was born in Almondbury, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
A useful lower order right-handed ba ...
who was heading the bowling averages early in 1949. He did modestly and with the presence of
Coxon,
Trueman
Trueman is a surname of English origin, and may refer to
* Albert William Trueman (1902–1988), Canadian educator and administrator
*Arthur Elijah Trueman (1894–1956), English geologist
*Bert Trueman (1882–1961), English footballer
*Brian T ...
and
Appleyard, was discarded and did not play even in the Second Eleven in 1950. McHugh then went to Gloucestershire and upon qualifying he quickly found that his accuracy could only become of county standard when he moderated his pace. Consequently, McHugh became with
George Lambert the best pace attack Gloucestershire – a county known for half a century for its near-exclusive reliance on spin bowling – had fielded to that point in the twentieth century. In 1954 he took ninety-two wickets for exactly twenty runs each, and in 1955 did almost as well with over seventy-five wickets, whilst in 1956 his average fell further to only nineteen runs a wicket.
McHugh's batting was consistently inept. His average of 2.63 is the lowest by anyone to play more than fifty first-class games.
[Cricket record lists do not keep records for lowest batting average, but Bailey, Phillip; Thorn, Phillip; and Wynne-Thomas, Peter; ''The Complete Who’s Who of Cricketers'' () shows nobody with nearly so low an average] 66 of his 111 innings were scoreless (he was dismissed for a duck 38 times), and he reached double figures on only four occasions. It was probably the liability of his batting that caused Gloucestershire to discard him in favour of
David Smith for the 1957 season: McHugh had suffered from illness during 1956,
[Preston, Norman (editor); ''Wisden Cricketers' Almanack'', 94th edition (1957); p. 364] and did not play after June, but had bowled so well in his last-ever game with eleven wickets for 112 runs that he was expected to continue in 1957.
Notes
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:McHugh, Francis
Yorkshire cricketers
Gloucestershire cricketers
People from Burmantofts
English cricketers
1925 births
2018 deaths
Cricketers from Leeds
20th-century English sportsmen