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The great opening partnership
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Percy Holmes and Herbert Sutcliffe ranks among the greatest opening partnerships in the history of cricket.
When such partnerships get broken, the impact on the surviving one is often huge.
Two years after Holmes was gone, Sutcliffe expressed his feelings in his autobiography:
"There are times when I miss the presence of Percy in the middle. The link has been broken and there has now only the memory of the past. But what a happy memory it is!
When I went out to open an innings with Percy there was always something to talk about on the way to the middle. I had grrown up in cricket with him and, because of that, I suppose, I was as deeply interested in his welfare as he was in mine. We always finished our walk to the middle with: "Well, the best of luck, old man."
Then we went to our ends. Percy to look round the field in that alert and perky way he had before he took the first ball."