Hedley Verity's 10 for 10 will likely never be beaten and carves his name in the record books as immutably as upon his grave

The bullet hit Hedley Verity in the chest. That's what his batman said, and he knew. The next day, his first as a prisoner-of-war, Tom Rennoldson returned to the battlefield with a "nice young German officer" who spoke English, and together they lifted Verity's limp body into a piece of broken mortar carrier which they had padded with sheaves of corn, then took him away to a field hospital. As the doctor prepared to operate, a grenade fell out of Verity's shirt pocket. "The Germans told me to unprime it," Rennoldson remembered, "and there, in the improvised operating theatre, I removed the detonator and made the grenade safe." Afterwards, Rennoldson and the ailing Verity shared a last tin of soup together. That afternoon the Germans parted them, sending Rennoldson away with the other fit men to a POW camp in Austria and Verity on to Naples, and eventually the town of Caserta, where he would die of his injuries.

A 79-year anniversary seems an odd one to mark, but a story like Verity's needs only the slenderest of excuses to be retold. It was on this day in 1932 that he produced the best bowling performance in the history of first class cricket, taking 10 wickets for 10 runs in a single innings against Nottinghamshire.

Ten for 10. Or in full: 19.4-16-10-10. You'd guess that is a record which will never be beaten. "The match will always be remembered for the bowling of Verity" wrote Dudley Carew in The Times the next day.

This article, like all the others, is testament to the truth of that.

In 1932 Verity was 28, but was playing only his third full season in the Yorkshire team. He was still in the lee of Wilfred Rhodes, who had blessed his successor in the side with the simple words "He'll do".

When Verity was chosen as one of Wisden's Five Cricketers of the Year in 1931, his citation began: "Verity, the Yorkshire slow-left-handed bowler, who, if yet lacking the phenomenal skill of Wilfred Rhodes, is rightly regarded as the natural successor to that famous player". The 10 for 10, following on from his 10 for 38 against Warwickshire the previous season, saw him emerge from Rhodes' shadow.

Yorkshire gifted Nottinghamshire a healthy lead on the first innings, after Brian Sellers chose to declare while his side were nine wickets down and still 71 runs behind. "How many other counties in the land would dream of such a gesture?" gushed 'Cricketer' in the Manchester Guardian, his high praise possibly prompting a few of his faithful Lancashire readers to splutter out their morning tea. "Here was cricket of a spirit which once on a time made the game a theme for poets."

Play on the final day was delayed by the overnight rain, and started at 12.30. Nottinghamshire's openers Keeton and Shipston batted through to lunch, taking the score to 38 and their team's lead to 109. Verity bowled seven successive maidens. "There were times," wrote Jim Kilburn in the Yorkshire Post, "when Verity seemed to spend three overs preparing an lbw snare against a batsman who, unharrassed, would probably have mishit into the covers anyway." Here he was slowly tightening a tourniquet around the batsmen.

After lunch the sun began to dry the pitch, though in The Observer 'Old Ebor' insisted that it was "nothing like the sticky dog it was reported to have been". That would tally with Kilburn, who said that it was "not upon the truly sticky wicket when that Verity was at his most deadly" and that he was more dangerous "when the ball stands up rather than turns quickly".

Keeton fell first, caught at slip. At that point Verity's figures were 10-9-2-1. Shipston was caught behind off the outside edge. Two deliveries later A.W. Carr was caught on the boundary as he hit down the ground. "The pitch," wrote Carew, "was now definitely difficult."

Four overs passed, and then Walker, "playing a perfectly correct stroke," was well caught by first slip. Harris fell "in much the same way" to the next ball. Verity's son Douglas explained that "My Dad said: 'The best length is the shortest you can bowl and still get the playing forward.'" That was the length he found that day at Headingley. "His flight and length," agreed Carew, "consistently made the batsmen play the stroke they did not wish too."

Now Hedley was on a hat-trick. His next delivery was his famous fuller ball, quicker, and swinging in. "Hedley would bowl this ball 16 times a season," said his team-mate Bill Bowes. "And it would get him 16 wickets." It was too good for G.V. Gunn. So Verity's 18th over was hat-trick maiden.

Six balls later Staples was caught at slip. Then Larwood whacked the next delivery to point. Verity missed his second hat-trick of the innings, but only just. Instead he took the last four wickets in six deliveries. In the space of 52 balls he had taken all 10 wickets for eight runs, and in his last 15 he had seven for three. Yorkshire's openers Sutcliffe and Holmes made the 139 runs they needed in a little over 90 minutes, and the game was won by 10 wickets and with an hour to spare. "Verity on a day of success is the personification of hostility," observed Kilburn. "A batsman falling victim to him might return to the pavilion assuring himself 'couldn't help it; it's quite impossible to play the man today."

Nobody had a better record against Don Bradman than Verity, who dismissed him eight times in 17 Tests. "With Hedley I am never sure," said The Don. "You see, there was no breaking point with him." There can be no higher compliment to a cricketer than that.

Eleven years later, Verity, a captain in the Green Howards, led his company in to that cornfield in Catania. Their target was a farmhouse at one end of a fortified ridge. They crawled on their bellies through the two-foot tall corn stalks while the tracer bullets flew overhead. The moon at their backs was outshone by the flares and mortar explosions. "We were up against it and we went right into it," remembered Rennoldson. "They set the corn alight and gave us everything they had got. We were trapped."

"Keep going," Verity urged. "Keep going and get them out of that farmhouse." Those were his last words to his men. They were forced to pull back, leaving Verity stricken in the field, Rennoldson by his side. Next Tuesday it will be the 68th anniversary of that night. All these years later, Verity's name is as carved as immutably in the record books as it is into his white marble gravestone, which sits in the War cemetery at Caserta. There was no breaking point with him.

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