wickets at 20.74. That season, although no longer considered for a place in the England team himself, Gilligan joined the panel of Test selectors, and as a consequence missed some cricket for Sussex. He published a book on that summer's tour by Australia called Collins's Men. MCC tour of India During the winter of 1926–27, with other candidates unavailable, Gilligan was chosen to captain an MCC team which toured India; the side was not fully representative and did not play Test matches. In first-class games, he scored three fifties and, bowling infrequently, took ten wickets on the tour. The team, the first to tour India under the colours of the MCC, was very successful. Gilligan left most of the day-to-day organisation to his vice-captain, Raleigh Chichester-Constable, and did not take his speech-making duties particularly seriously. He nevertheless had to deal with several issues. One of the team, Jack Parsons, refused for religious reasons to take part in matches that included Sunday play; Gilligan threatened to send him home but in the end he agreed to play on condition that he could leave early on a Sunday to attend religious services. Parsons was also openly critical of racial and social discrimination that he saw. Gilligan himself intervened at one point when the MCC professionals were excluded from some invitations in Calcutta; he told their hosts that no-one would attend the functions if the professionals were not included. Both the sporting and social programmes for the tour were demanding, and Gilligan chose to attend most functions for fear of offending their hosts. The players were left exhausted, necessitating the use of reinforcements to their number, including the occasional use of English cricketers who were coaching in India and, in several matches, the Maharajah of Patiala, who was a member of the MCC and entitled to play for the team. The tour was originally conceived to encourage cricket-playing Europeans living in India. But as the team was financed by the Maharajah of Patiala, it played Indian sides, rather than the European sides envisaged by the tour's organisers. Gilligan, in contrast to many Englishmen, was happy to play Indian teams and actively encouraged Indians to organise their own cricket rather than leave it up to white Englishmen. According to the cricket writer Mihir Bose, Gilligan, unlike others, "met Indians on terms of perfect equality". He successfully encouraged the Indians to form their own cricket