A hat-trick in sport is a rare thing that should always be celebrated.
The term actually originated in cricket, and is marvellously English.
Back in 1858, the English bowler H.H Stephenson took three wickets in three consecutive balls.
This was so rare that his colleagues had a whip round and decided to buy him a hat as a reward.
From then on, the term “hat-trick” has been used in a range of sports to describe an individual player scoring three times.
In cricket, it’s a feat as difficult as a golfer getting a hole in one – three wickets in three balls.
The difference is that in football, a player has 90 minutes and endless chances to score a hat-trick.
The football version requires a player to hit quite a big target in as many attempts as they can fit in whereas the cricket version requires a number of things to go right.
The bowler either has to bowl three balls in a row straight enough hit the stumps, which is very rare at our level.
Or, the bowler must rely on his colleagues to catch the ball.
Three wickets in three balls requires a remarkably high level of skill from people who are, quite frankly, mostly lacking it.
For my lot, there hasn’t been one since 2014, where our veteran opening bowler had a great day against a team who normally thrash us.
I have been involved in two hat tricks, neither as the bowler.
In the first, I assisted our bowler by taking a pretty nifty low catch for the second of his three wickets.
The other saw me aid the opposition bowler by poking the ball very gently to a fielder for a catch for his third wicket, a moment of complete and total mental surrender that still makes me cringe at least 20 years on.
Hat-tricks are probably the rarest occurrence in cricket.
The marvellously named Middlesex bowler Albert Trott took two in the same innings in 1907.
He’s also the only player ever to hit the ball over the pavilion at Lord’s, not a bad feat 120 odd years ago.
More recently, the terrifying Aussie left-armer Mitchell Stark took hat-tricks in both innings of a Sheffield Shield match in 2017.
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These achievements are all pretty impressive, but they are pro players who you’d expect to bowl some pretty decent balls.
What is totally unfathomable is that our lot had TWO bowlers take hat-tricks in the same innings.
Annoyingly, one of the cricketers involved was my father, and it was the SECOND time he’d taken one.
I found the old match report, written by me, and here’s what happened.
Hat Trick Heroes
The game was against Binfield, at their ground, in September 2006.
Nowadays, Binfield are a formidable unit with a huge player base and facilities most clubs can dream of.
To give an example, we turned up to play there a few years ago and they had a young left-armer bowling high-speed howitzers at our hapless batters.
That lad is now a Premier League footballer who has played for England.
But in 2006, there wasn’t quite the gulf that exists now.
The hat-trick takers were Tim Cooper, an interesting character who looked like a football hooligan but was incredibly intelligent and well-read.
The other was my father, who very much does not look like a football hooligan, but likes to think he’s very well read, despite not knowing who anyone famous is.
Tim was, on his day, a nasty bowler who bowled fast and short, and dad was the canny off-spinner who had the same cricket jumper for his entire 50-year career.
Cooper ripped through Binfield’s top order batsmen, taking the wickets of both openers and the number four bat, which suggests it was two balls at the end of one over and the first ball of the next.
Our wicketkeeper Adam Smith, rarely short of a quip, described the three balls as “a terrible shot, a good catch and a good old-fashioned straight ball”.
After taking his third wicket, Cooper was heard to say:
“I don’t really care what happens now.
“I’ve taken a hat-trick.”
A real team man.
Dad, who scored more than 17,000 runs for the club and took around 700 wickets in 50 seasons, took the tail-end of the batting order apart.
At the time, he said:
“I’m thrilled. I’ve taken one hat-trick before but that was when I was a quick bowler more than 30 (now 50) years ago when I got the figures of six wickets for one run, but wickets were more helpful back then.
“I didn’t think it would happen again.
“When I got two in a row I just concentrated on bowling a straight ball and the batsmen missed it.
“I’ve seen batsmen running seven in one go, one-handed catches on the boundary, dreadful umpiring decisions, comical run-outs and people being sick in the bushes while fielding, but I’ve never seen anything like this and doubt I will again.”
When discussing this recently, he revealed one of the batters was a 13-year-old boy who stood and watched as the ball spun gently onto his stumps.
For the record, I contributed one run, no wickets and no catches to this epic day.
To no one’s surprise, this has never happened again, and hat-tricks remain extremely rare.
