page_title: Alan Melville
section_title: Cricket in England
hierarchical_section_title: Alan Melville / Cricket in England
caption_attribution_description: Sussex captain Alan Melville (left) with the captain of Australia, Don Bradman, prior to the match at Hove, 25th August 1934. Australia won by an innings and 35 runs.
context_page_description: Alan Melville was a South African cricketer who played in 11 Tests from 1938 to 1949. He was born in Carnarvon, Northern Cape, South Africa and died at Sabie, Transvaal.
context_section_description: Melville made an unbeaten century in the Freshman's trial match at Oxford and was thereafter a regular in the Oxford University side over the next four years, winning a Blue each year.
  He scored 78 in his first first-class innings for Oxford against Kent in May 1930. In the next game, he scored 118 against Yorkshire. He did not maintain that form, but finished with 591 runs at an average of 32.83, plus 19 rather expensive wickets, though he was not successful with either bat or ball in the University Match against Cambridge University. Melville's record improved slightly in 1931, with
  631 runs and an average of 35.05, though there were no centuries. Injury to the University team's designated captain, Denis Moore, meant that Melville led the side in the University Match where, with an unbeaten 238 from the Nawab of Pataudi which overshadowed 201 for Cambridge by Alan Ratcliffe, Oxford achieved the first victory over Cambridge since 1923. In 1932, Melville was the Oxford captain in his own right, but his season was disrupted by injury – though not to the same degree as Moore's had been in 1931 – when he broke his collarbone while batting in the match against the Free Foresters by colliding with his partner, Pieter van der Bijl. Melville had made an unbeaten century, 113* before the collision. On his return to the side in late June, he was successful with the ball, taking a hat-trick and nine wickets in the game against H. D. G. Leveson Gower's XI, and he finished top of the University bowling averages. In the University Match, Melville was unable to repeat his leadership success of 1931, and the match was drawn.
  Following the end of the 1932 University cricket season, Melville made his debut for Sussex, playing in 11 matches and scoring consistent runs, if with no high scores. Unusually, though no longer captain, he returned to Oxford in 1933 for a fourth season and a fourth Blue and although he featured in fewer than half the University side's matches, he hit his highest Oxford score, an innings of 127 made in less than two-and-a-quarter hours against a very weak Surrey attack at The Oval. He played for Sussex again in the second half of the 1933 season and, as in the previous year, was not conspicuously successful – until, virtually at the end of the season, the West Indian touring team played Sussex. Facing a big West Indian total, Sussex, with Melville as stand-in captain, opened with Ted Bowley and John Langridge, and Manny Martindale and Herman Griffith were both bowling with aggressively and using leg theory, the tactic that had been used in the Bodyline controversy of the previous winter by England in Australia. Bowley was quickly hurt and retired; Melville came in and began hitting the bowling; Langridge was then also forced to retire hurt (he later returned to make 172), but Melville went on to 114 and a four-man first-wicket stand of 223.
  The reason Melville was captaining Sussex at the end of the 1933 season was that the regular captain Robert Scott, himself a stand-in for the permanently unwell K. S. Duleepsinhji, had stood down because of the death of his father; Scott was unable to resume in 1934, and Melville took over the Sussex captaincy for the next two seasons. Sussex had finished second in the County Championship for each of the preceding two seasons and under Melville in 1934 they again finished second, but there was veiled criticism of changes to the county's style of play in the 1935 edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack. "Sussex, renowned for their attractive and enterprising hitting, developed a somewhat stodgy game in their efforts to finish at the top and they thus defeated their own ends," it said. "At times they would not risk anything." Wisden compared Melville's "strange disinclination to experiment" with the adventurous approach taken by Maurice Tate, the senior professional at the club, who captained the side when Melville missed a few games. As a batsman, Melville was highly successful, scoring 1504 runs at an average of 42.97 with three centuries, though in the heady world of Sussex bat
caption: Melville with the Australian captain Don Bradman before their match on 25 August 1934
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