Cricinfo - A man called Horseshoe, and a ball through the stumps

The regular Monday column in which Steven Lynch answers your questions about (almost) any aspect of cricket:

Which Test captain was known as "Horseshoe"? asked Frank Gorman from Brisbane

This was Herbie Collins, who played 19 Tests for Australia in the 1920s, starting with a bang with 70, 104, 64 and 162 in his first four innings, and captaining in the Ashes series of 1924-25 and 1926. The name came because he was thought to be lucky (which was another of his nicknames!), and possibly also arose out of an interest in horses - he was a bookmaker for a while. But Ray Robinson's superb book on Australia's Test captains, On Top Down Under reveals that most of his team-mates called him "Nutty" - "it's an even-money guess whether this was because he used his nut or because he was a hard nut to crack".

Has the ball ever gone between the stumps in a Test without the bails falling off? asked Colin Ball from Sheen

The only such incident that I'm aware of happened during the third Test between Pakistan and South Africa at Faisalabad in 1997-98. Mushtaq Ahmed was bowling to Pat Symcox, South Africa's No. 9, and a googly shot between the middle and off stumps ... but the bails stayed put. Wisden reported: "Umpire Dunne gave his spectacles a disbelieving wipe, but the bail was found to be badly cut." Symcox, who had 56 at the time, went on to makeundefined 82 - very important runs, as it turned out, as South Africa ended up winning a close match by 53 runs.

Why are the Champions Trophy matches in Mumbai being played at the Brabourne Stadium and not the Wankhede? asked Anirudh Sharma from Kolkata

It has to do with the ICC's request for a "clean" - advertisement-free - stadium for matches in their tournaments. The Wankhede Stadium apparently couldn't guarantee this, so the matches scheduled for Mumbai were transferred to the Brabourne Stadium down the road, which could. The matches in this tournament are the first ODIs to be staged at the Brabourne since November 1995, when India played New Zealand there. Only two previous ODIs had been played there: the Wankhede Stadium has staged 14.

Who was Wankhede? And come to that, who was Brabourne? asked Nishin Patel from London

The Brabourne Stadium, as this page reveals, was built on a piece of land originally reclaimed from the sea. The ground was named after Lord Brabourne, the Governor of Bombay at the time, who laid the foundation stone in May 1936: the first match was played there the following year, and the first Test in 1948-49, against West Indies. Tests were played there until 1972-73, when a long-running dispute about ticket arrangements between the Cricket Club of India, which owns the ground, and the Bombay Cricket Association led the BCA to set up its own ground, a couple of blocks away. They named it after S. K. Wankhede, their president at the time: it staged its first Test in 1974-75, and all the Tests in Mumbai since.

It is theoretically possible to take a hat-trick in three different overs. Has anyone ever done this in a Test? asked Sameer Agrawal from India

In the first 111 years of Test cricket, there were 17 hat-tricks, and all of them came in the same innings, although some of them involved two different overs. Then, at Brisbane in 1988-89, Courtney Walsh took a hat-trick for West Indies against Australia that was spread over two innings. Amazingly, in the very next Test at Perth, Australia's Merv Hughes did the same thing - and this time it involved part of three different overs. "Big Merv" had Curtly Ambrose caught behind with the last ball of his 36th over, then had last man Patrick Patterson caught from the first ball of his next over, which ended the innings. That meant he was on a hat-trick, which he completed late the following day by trapping Gordon Greenidge lbw with the first ball of the second innings. For the full list of Test hat-tricks, click here. By the way, in answer to several correspondents, a hat-trick can be spread over two innings like this, but not over two separate matches - I'm not quite sure why!

I've got a quiz question I can't answer: "Who dropped out of a Test with hay fever, and never played again?" Can you help please? asked Andy Powell from Northampton

This sniffling batsman was Norman "Mandy" Mitchell-Innes, who played for England against South Africa at Trent Bridge in 1935 after scoring 168 against them while an undergraduate at Oxford University. He made 5 in his only innings of a rain-affected Test, and was retained for the next match, at Lord's, but had to drop out after a severe attack of hay fever - and he never caught the selectors' eyes again. Wisden sympathised: "It was extremely bad luck that hay fever should have troubled him so much. Beyond doubt this affected his cricket, though personally he refused to admit it as any excuse when he got few runs." Mitchell-Innes didn't play regularly after 1936, his best season (1438 runs at 44.93), although as late as 1948 he was of three captains named by Somerset in a rather bizarre experiment. Now 92, he is England's oldest living Test cricketer.

Steven Lynch is the deputy editor of The Wisden Group. For some of these answers he was helped by Travis Basevi, the man who built Stats Guru. If you want to Ask Steven a question, contact him through our feedback form. The most interesting questions will be answered each week in this column. Unfortunately, we can't usually enter into correspondence about individual queries

A man called Horseshoe, and a ball through the stumps

The regular Monday column in which Steven Lynch answers your questions about (almost) any aspect of cricket: