The week’s topics by the sports editor

So Ellis Robinson, Denaby Main, county cricketer, has accomplished the feat that his hundreds of cricketing well-wishers in South Yorkshire knew full well he would achieve in his first post-war season a place in the test trial which opens up towards next Wednesday.

Robinson, who will figure in the rest side was an automatic choice, and no doubt many will be disappointed that he has not been selected for the England team, but he can rest assured that if he maintains the dazzling form he has been displaying in their county competition to date, he will catch the selectors eyes for one of the tests this year.

If not the first, Robinsons lead in the bowling averages as revealed in the tables published on Monday, is still more pronounced: he had taken 37 wickets for an average cost of 8.40 runs, and though the Gloucestershire bats may have altered that figure a little, his performances make him the best spin bowler, in English cricket to day.

Incidentally. Robinson has not been without personal misfortune this season – during preliminary skirmishes at the nets at Headingley before the season opened he was struck in the eye by a ball and had to receive medical attention and on Saturday he worked so diligently trying to spin the ball on that unresponsive wicket that he took the skin off a finger or two.