Doug Ring

Douglas Thomas Ring (14 October 1918 – 23 June 2003) was an Australian cricketer who played for Victoria and for Australia in 13 Test matches between 1948 and 1953.

In 129 first-class cricket matches, he took 426 wickets bowling leg spin, and he had a top score of 145 runs, which was the only century of his career.

After playing schoolboy cricket, he played the final matches of the 1935–36 season with the first grade side at Prahran.

He batted right-handed and bowled right-arm leg breaks.

He topped the Victorian Cricket Association's second-grade bowling averages and joined the Richmond first grade team.

In 1938, after five matches with Richmond, he was selected for Victoria.

In his first match, in December 1938, he took four New South Wales wickets, including Sid Barnes, bowling alongside Chuck Fleetwood-Smith.

In the following game, batting at No 9, he put on 112 for the eighth wicket with Lindsay Hassett, making 51 runs himself.

He did not appear in Victoria's other Sheffield Shield matches that 1938–39 season, but later, playing against Western Australia in Perth in a first-class non-Shield match – Western Australia did not join the Sheffield Shield until after the Second World War – he took six wickets for 97 runs in Western Australia's first innings.

In the 1939–40 season, Ring played in all of Victoria's Sheffield Shield matches, and though he did not improve on either his best bowling or best batting figures, he took over as the side's principal spin bowler from Fleetwood-Smith, with 28 wickets in the six matches against the senior player's 17.

At the end of the season, he was picked for "The Rest" team, composed of the best players from the other states, for the match against the Shield winners, New South Wales, though he was upstaged by the 48-year-old Clarrie Grimmett, who took 10 wickets to Ring's one in the match.

Wisden noted in a brief report on the 1939–40 Sheffield Shield in its 1940 edition that Bill O'Reilly, Grimmett and Ring "carried off chief bowling honours in the competition".

Prior to the Second World War, the Australian captain Don Bradman said of Ring: "If I were picking an Australian XI to go to England now, one of the first men on my list would be Doug Ring".

In the first-class season of 1940–41, with the proposed England tour and the Sheffield Shield competition both cancelled because of the war, Ring played half a dozen first-class matches for Victoria, achieving little with his bowling, but making 72 when promoted to No 3 batsman as a nightwatchman against South Australia at Adelaide and following that up with 60 against Queensland at Brisbane.

The war then interrupted Ring's first-class career.

Ring joined the Australian Army and served with an anti-aircraft regiment in New Guinea.

During his military service he injured his back, displacing a disc.

The injury flared up from time to time, especially in cold weather, and this affected his ability to bowl to a consistent length.

Ring's war service in the Far East meant that he did not appear in the Australian Services XI that made such an impact in England.

He resumed his state cricket career in 1946–47, and made the only century of his career, 145, against Queensland at Melbourne, sharing a sixth wicket partnership of 288 runs with Sam Loxton, who made 232.

The batting success was offset by less effective bowling: he took just 18 Sheffield Shield wickets, barely half the number (33) achieved by Victoria's left-arm spinner George Tribe, who was picked for three Tests against England that season, but then turned his back on Australian cricket and moved to England.

Ring made his Test debut against India in the 1947–48 season and was picked for Australia's tour of England in 1948, the so-called "Invincibles" side, but played in only one Test match on the tour.

Victoria in the 1947–48 season was a weak team and finished bottom of the Sheffield Shield table.

Ring took 23 wickets, the highest of any Victoria bowler, in Shield matches but at the high average of 33 runs apiece.

His best bowling of the season came in a match against Tasmania where he improved his career-best bowling figures by taking six for 84 in the first innings and followed that with five for 59 in the second innings for his first 10-wicket match haul (11–143).

It was a good time to make an eye-catching performance: the next match at the MCG was the fifth and final Test against India and Ring was selected, replacing Colin McCool, who had taken only four wickets in three matches of the five-Test series, and making his Test debut.

After Australia made 575 for eight declared, with Ring making 11 when batting at No 10, Ring bowled 36 eight-ball overs, taking three for 103 as India reached 331, and then took three further wickets for just 17 in a second-innings capitulation for just 67.

With match figures of six for 120 in his first game, Ring was picked for the 1948 tour of England, the tour led by Donald Bradman that became known, through its unbeaten record, as "The Invincibles".

Though the 1948 tour of England was a triumph for the Australians, Ring was not prominent in the success.

The faster bowlers, headed by Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller, dominated the bowling attack, and with a new ball allowed after just 55 overs of play, spin bowlers made little impact in the big matches.

Ring, said Wisden in its summary of the tour, "was never a trump card in the pack".

Such was the strength of the Australian bowling that Ring's 60 first-class wickets at an average of 21.81 on the tour was the highest bowling average of the regular bowlers.

The strength of the batting side also meant that he batted only 14 times in his 19 first-class matches on the tour, and he passed 50 only once.

He played in one Test match—the last of the five-match series, at The Oval.

He did not bowl in the first innings as England were dismissed for just 52, and took one wicket—that of Allan Watkins—in 28 economical overs in the second innings as Bradman's final Test ended in an innings victory.

Ring and fellow fringe members of the squad, Ron Hamence and Colin McCool, would refer themselves as the "ground-staff" as it was unlikely that the tour selectors would include them in the Test team on the 1948 tour.

Over the next three Australian seasons, Ring played regularly for Victoria and appeared also in some lesser representative matches.

He had greater success against West Indies in 1951–52, and South Africa the following season and made a second less successful tour of England in 1953.

Following cricket, Ring held positions in industry administration in Victoria, and became a cricket radio commentator and later host of Australia's World of Sport.

Born in Hobart, Ring moved to Victoria as a child, and attended Melbourne High School.