Football and cricket: Swindon Town players with two sports – Swindon Advertiser

Given that such legendary footballers of yesterday year like Geoff Hurst and Denis Compton also played first-class Cricket for their local county teams, it is perhaps no surprise to find that several Swindon footballers have played cricket for Swindon as well as football.
Pride of place has to go to Robbie Reynolds, as without him, the County Ground might never have existed. He was playing when the football club was an amateur organisation, as the cricket club has remained to this day.
Robbie played with several of his friends, such as Arthur Dibsdall, in the Winter, but in the Summer, some other footballers played for a railway-linked team in Farringdon Road Park. Robbie persuaded his dad, William Reynolds, to get together with other town worthies to set up the County Ground Sports Company.
This organisation had ambitious aims to create a ground where not only football and cricket but cycling, athletics, and even polo could be played. For Robbie, the beauty of this scheme was that he felt with a good ground reserved for cricket, rather than a public park like Faringdon Road ground, his friends could be persuaded to join up with him, and they could enjoy football and cricket together.
In 1901, Reynolds resumed the captaincy of the cricket club and scored well over five hundred runs, making him the club’s leading run scorer. The following year saw him pass the five thousand run mark for the club, and he was still playing for the cricket club in 1909. Although rated one of the best wingers, his football career was shorter and less distinguished, as despite the arrival of professionalism, Robbie remained an amateur.
In 1913, it was two Swindon footballers who combined to set the cricket club’s highest ever partnership of 301, a record which still stands today. Charlie Williams was the town goalkeeper in the late nineteenth century. A substantial figure even in his footballing days, he had ballooned to well over twenty stone at the time of the record partnership, and one surmises most of the runs must have come in boundaries.
Charlie became the licensee of the County Hotel, which provided welcome refreshments for cricketers and footballers alike. Indeed, having had his initial application for a liquor license refused, it was Town players who gave evidence at the appeal, stating they needed liquid refreshment after training sessions.
Like Charlie, by the time he shared the record partnership with him, Jimmy Pugh had finished playing football for Town. His footballing career had ended in a rather confused fashion. He had opted to become an amateur in order to develop his career as a groundsman, but applied to return to the professional ranks a year later. The club had been unwilling to resign him, however.
Paul Plowman’s Swindon Register contains the interesting stat that Jimmy is the only Swindon player to have notched up four FA Cup hat-tricks in three seasons. In 1902-3, having contributed one goal in a first-round victory over Chippenham Town, he scored hat-tricks against Poole and Whitehead Torpedos in rounds three and four, respectively. The following season, he hit another hat trick against Poole in a 9-0 first-round victory. In 1904-5, he just missed out on a second hat trick against Whitehead Torpedos in the first round before scoring his final hat trick against Longfleet in round two.
Although his playing career ended before World War One, his involvement with Swindon would resume after it. Jimmy had taken on the role of groundsman at the cricket club, and in the 1930s he moved into this role with the football club.
The legendary Harold Fleming, who won nine caps for England while with Swindon Town, was a multi-talented sportsman. He was captain of the Swindon Golf Club, Secretary of the Tennis Club and coach of the hockey club, so it was no surprise that he also played for the cricket team.
This was in the early twenties, and he announced his arrival at the cricket club with 46 runs and seven wickets in a match against Marlborough College. He became the team captain in 1923 when still playing football, and even after his retirement from cricket, gave the cricket club great support, supplying them with bats and other cricket gear at heavily discounted prices from his sports shop in Commercial Road.
A character that has to be mentioned is Ted Nash. Ted was actually the goalkeeper in Town’s first ever Football League match, but it was not until 1922 that he became the regular choice keeper, being ever present in the 1922-3 season. He went on to make well over two hundred appearances before ending his time with Town in 1930. It was this season that saw him add Manchester United to Arsenal and Newcastle United as top clubs he kept clean sheets against in Cup ties. He lost his place at Swindon due to injury and moved to play for Crystal Palace.
A goalkeeper for Swindon Town in the Winter in the Summer, he became the “custodian of the gauntlet” as wicket keepers were somewhat pretentiously referred to. He was a bag of tricks at cricket. This included gently knocking a bail off with his foot when standing up to the stumps, to wrapping his bat in sandpaper to help remove the shine from the ball.
The expansion of the football season has seen an end to footballers playing on Saturdays, but footballing cricketers survived into the sixties with Don Rogers playing for the Wednesday XI. Indeed, the club had its own team, which played in the Morse Shield or Midnight League. This seems to have been organised by director, Cecil Green and a surviving photo shows him with coach Jack Conley and players Jimmy Giles, Keith Morgan, Ken Sheen and John Trollope.
Nowadays, while supporters may watch both cricket and football at Swindon, sometimes on the same day when both teams are at home, players of one have little time to partake of the other especially as the overlap between the two seasons grows ever longer causing conflicts of loyalty for supporters too.
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