The Rasputin Scoreboard, SCG, 1933

It’s the final Test of the Bodyline series. England have already won the series. But the crowd is baying for blood. Now, take a look at bottom right hand corner of the scoreboard.

Rasputin is, at a guess, a reference to the villain of the series, English captain Douglas Jardine. (Better researchers than me could easily find out. Trove, anyone?)

Rasputin was, depending on what you read, a saint, a sinner, a peasant, a mystic.  He was assassinated in December 1916 in an attempt to save the Russian empire from his influence over the czar. Alas, the Russian revolution was only months away.

I found the photo in The Larwood Story, which I found in a footpath library.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s