An Irishman’s Diary on Hiberno-Australian cricket

I’ve heard of people blazing trails, of course.  But until recently, I had never heard of someone trailing blazers.

The was before I read about a man called Thomas Joseph Dart Kelly, who was born in Waterford in the 1840s, moved to England in childhood, and later emigrated to Melbourne, where he became a noted cricketer. It was thus, according to one historian of the sport, that he became the first man in Australia "to wear a blazer".

Radical as that sounds, however, it’s not the most important thing he did Down Under.  He was also a member, 140 years ago this week, of an Aussie team that played in the first ever international cricket match.

Nor was he the only Irishman on the side.  There was also a Thomas Patrick Horan, born in Midleton.  And in a cheering omen for the weekend that's coming, the two Paddies were central to the match result: a resounding defeat for the visiting English.

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Horan top-scored for Australia in the first test, played over several days including St Patrick’s, with 20 runs (a respectable total on the pitches of the time, while Kelly: who had sat out the first test, hit 35 in the second, to help clinch a 2-0 win).

Horan went on to captain his adopted country, briefly. And speaking of blazers, he was also part of the Australian team that, in 1882, beat England in London, inspiring the mock newspaper obituary that spoke of English cricket’s cremation and led in turn to the nickname that has defined games between the two countries ever since: “the Ashes”.

Of Kelly’s subsequent life, little is known.  But Horan’s is well documented, because he became one of the most famous chroniclers of the sport too, writing about it under the pseudonym “Felix” for almost 40 years, and wielding a pen with the same vigour he had applied to the bat.

Gnawed out

Describing the 1882 test, he claimed the tension had been so great that one of the spectators “dropped down dead, and another . . . gnawed out pieces of his umbrella handle”.

As for the players, “It was a match in which the last English batsman had to screw his courage to the sticking place by the aid of champagne; when one man’s lips were ashen grey and his throat so parched that he could hardly speak as he strode by me to the crease; when the scorer’s hand shook so much that he wrote [last English batsman] Peate’s name like “geese”.

The history-making of Kelly and Horan coincided, interestingly, with the climactic adventures of another Kelly – Ned – in that same part of the world.  They, by contrast, stayed the right side of the law.  Horan married the daughter of a Melbourne policeman.  And cricket aside, the most political thing he seems to have done was dying just before Easter 1916

Those veterans of St Patrick's week 1877 remain the only Irish-born players to represent Australia, although a historic who's who of the game in that country suggests that many children of the diaspora have followed them.  The roll-call of surnames includes O'Brien, O'Reilly, McCabe, and McCormick, among many others.  There's even a Kerry O'Keeffe.

And then there was Jack Fingleton, an Aussie of Irish descent who followed the trail-blazers/blazer trailers of 1877 in more ways than one.

A dogged, opening batsman, he played 18 times for his country in the 1930s and went on to become a well-known journalist, commenting not just about cricket, but on politics too.

Even as a player he was political, considered the leader of a Catholic-Irish faction within the team  that was accused of undermining their famous captain, Donald Bradman.

Private exchange

At the height of the “Bodyline” bowling controversy, Fingleton was also a chief suspect behind the so-called “Adelaide leak”.  Cricket’s version of the Ems Telegraph, it allowed the media to report a private exchange in which the English team manager visited the Australian dressing room to sympathise with their bruised batsmen, only to be rebuffed in anger and to retreat close to tears.

But Fingleton was also known for his mischievous wit, as speaker and writer.  It accompanied him on a tour of his ancestral homeland in 1938, when he played in both Dublin and Belfast.

On his visit to the latter, he was given a tour of the parliament in Stormont.  At one point of which, although he knew exactly where he was, he is said to have asked his tour guide to point out the seat of the famous “Mr de Valera”.