Alfred Mynn's great innings at Barker's Ground, Leicester

Gladstone Street, one of the Leicester streets later built on Barker's Ground, awaits demolition in 1972 © Dennis Calow.

This week's issue of The Spin, a cricket email from The Guardian, tells the story of the Kent cricketer Alfred Mynn and his greatest innings:

His greatest and most famous innings was played in Leicester in August 1836, and on one leg, while representing the south of England in a game against the north. 

He was warming up against the bowling of Leicestershire’s Samuel Dakin when he hit the ball into his own ankle (perhaps uncoincidentally, given his part in this incident, in the 1861 census Dakin described himself as a manufacturer of leg-guards). 

Mynn was in too much pain to play on the first, rain-shortened day and on the second came in at No 9 in the South’s first innings, scoring 21 not out. In their second innings, despite being barely able to walk, he came in at No 4 and scored a scarcely credible 125.

His leg was so badly injured that it was almost amputated.

The reason I am blogging about Mynn here is that his greatest innings was played, not just in Leicester, but at Barker's Ground, the lost ground that lay under the slums of the Wharf Street district.

I blogged about Barker's Ground two years ago.

As is the way with blogging, the site about Robert Lees (the Leicester mystic who turns up in some of the more fanciful solutions of the Jack the Ripper case) that told me there was a cricket ground here has since disappeared.