DIFFERENT KINDS OF CRICKET.
" w-HAT is the matter with cricket?" one of the daily papers has been asking for a long time without conferring much benefit on the game. There are several different answers, and one of them is the match which was played at Lord's on Friday and Saturday last week between Eton and Harrow. Nothing is the matter with that kind of cricket, which is the game in its very beat form, played as a game should be played; always interesting and occasionally intensely exciting to see. The Eton and Harrow match this year was one of the very best of the whole long series. It was a game of ups and downs, of quick changes which put first one side and then the other ahead. It was a game which required just those qualities of courage and determination which Mr. Newbolt has for ever associated with schoolboy cricket in his noble poem " Vital Lampada." When the first day's play had ended with an advantage to Harrow of 86 runs on the first innings, Eton had to take the field the next morning with the knowledge that Harrow would begin the day with the best of the wicket, and that the match could only be won by getting rid of them cheaply and making a biggish score themselves in the fourth innings of the match. They did get rid of Harrow cheaply, as it happened, in spite of a most plucky piece of batting by Wilson, the Harrow captain ; and they went in with 231 to make to win, which is none too easy a task for a schoolboy eleven, even when they can bat as far down the list as the Eton team. They had 188 on the board for five wickets down, and then lost Hambro, who had made 77 and was well set. With 43 still to make and four wickets to go down it was any- body's match, and the two Eton batsmen, Hankey and Anson, cannot have felt untroubled; but they played as if nerves were out of the question, and between them made the runs and won the match. Not without more than a little luck; for
there were two successive balls from Jessopp, each of which barely missed the wicket and added four to the Eton score, one a snick and the other a bye. An inch or so more, and the fortune of the match might have remained with Harrow. To many onlookers those eight runs, coming when they did, and coupled with the batsman's escape, seemed the final turning- point of the game.
In the first fortnight of July a spectator going from match to match would find cricket of four or five different kinds. There is school cricket, to begin with, typified by the Eton and Harrow match, which many people think the cricket best worth watching of any. In no other cricket is there a more intense desire to win the match for the side ; there is nobody thinking first of his average, there are opportunities of captaincy which gain interest from the very fact that the captain is inexperienced, and, just because the players are boys, the uncertainty of the game is the greater. Next there is the University match, which ought to show better batting and bowling than the schools, and in which the fielding is traditionally the best to be seen anywhere. But this year, at all events, the Oxford and Cambridge match was hardly worth watching : the batting was the dull modern sort, and there was no player on either side who was thought good enough to be picked for the Gentlemen and Players matches—a thing which seldom happens. The Gentlemen and Players matches, of course, ought to, and usually do, provide the finest cricket of the year. This year was no exception, for the match which ended at Lord's on Wednesday was marked by some of the best bowling that has been seen for many seasons, Mr. J. W. H. T. Douglas taking thirteen of the Players' wickets for 172 runs. The cricket is nearly always most exhilarating when the Gentlemen win. The fourth kind of cricket, on the other hand, which is the county match, is some of the dullest. It need not be dull, but it happens that it is. Cricket altogether is a very different game from what it was twenty or even fifteen years ago, and this difference is emphasized more in county matches than in others. The difference is not only in the game as a spectacle, but in the science of playing. The old style of batting was to stand with the feet clear of the wicket, to keep the right foot still except in cutting or in jumping out to drive, and to bring the left shoulder and left foot well across when driving to the off. There was a good deal of forward play and reaching out at the pitch of the ball, and a batsman with a very long reach who played hard forward and drove the ball frequently, who was not afraid to cut, and occasionally made a real old- fashioned leg-hit—such a batsman as Lord George Scott, for instance—played innings which were delightful to watch. But the Scott type hardly exists to-day. The modern bats- man has to meet a new kind of bowling. Bowlers have learnt bow to make the ball swerve in the air, and the batsman watches the ball in a different way; he stands in front of his wicket almost facing the bowler, and instead of driving or cutting he edges the ball to leg. The consequence is that he has become deadly dull to watch; not only he, but the game also. It is played almost on one side of the wicket only; it is even possible to find a bowler putting eight out of his nine fieldsmen on the leg side. That means that he expects no cutting and no driving, which, with the leg hit, make up the best of batting.
Few people care to pay to see this kind of game, and that is one of the reasons of the decline in county cricket. Not all counties, of course, have suffered in the same way, for some play brighter cricket than others ; but, generally speaking, the game as played by county teams is duller than it used to be, and the cause of the dulness is the competition among the pro- fessionals. They are playing for their living, and they cannot afford to take the game light-heartedly. If the bowling has become more scientific, that is, if the bowler has discovered new ways of getting the batsman out, then the batsman, in his turn, must adopt new means for staying in. He finds that he stays in longer if he does not attempt to hit, but is content to stop those balls which he cannot turn to leg; so there he stays, and the would-be spectator stays away. Of course, there are exceptions among professionals as among counties, but the tendency as a whole is to this duller, pushing, glancing and placing game, and after a time it is not worth watching. The gate-money decreases, because fewer want to watch, and in turn the status of the professional
changes with the decline in the gate. His livelihood must disappear if the county team disappears, and the risk of its disappearance is not decreased by recurring deficits in the county club balance-sheets. Is there a remedy ? It seems hardly worth while to look for one. The conditions under which the County Championship is played alter very slowly ; the future of the game is not bound up with pro- fessionalism; and changes of method, both in bowling and batting, are generally due to the more or less sudden appear- ance of some individual style adopted by a particular player-- by Mr. B. J. T. Bosanquet and his "googlie," for instance. The "googlie " has already lost many of its terrors as a ball, even if it must still be reckoned a horrible addition to the vocabulary; and perhaps even the "googlie" and the swerve will be superseded by some new discovery in bowling. Such a change might occur in any season, and the methods of batting would change again to meet it. Meanwhile, schoolboy cricket remains, and perhaps will remain, better worth watching than the cricket of better players.
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