CRICKET
Bat versus Ball No more nonsense will be talked this season about cricket being a dull game. What with Ames' hurricane-hitting against the Oval clock ; the University match a series of shocks ; Eton losers, and Yorkshire—enterprising at every chance— bobbing up and down near, though not always at the top of, the Championship table, these are rousing times. Bat and ball are no longer in a sleepy half-hostility, but in stern con- test. " 26 wickets fall today at Derby" ran a recent headline. That's cricket.
Just as bat and ball are made for conflict, so, on occasion, do they struggle for ascendancy in the individual cricketer, since the game is kind to those with an itch to change. For instance, two Yorkshiremen, Verity and Rhodes, have played as slow bowlers for their country, and appeared later as open- ing bats, Rhodes with splendid success. Bowling often wins in the end ; it did with Rhodes and Verity and Tate, though Iddon, O'Connor, Townsend and other notables have found in batting their staple diet. Much depends on pace. Some- times it is personal preference which works a final settle- ment ; more often it is the needs of a particular team. But reversal of role is always exciting. Larwood making 90 odd in a Test was a sight for sun-strained eyes ; and it was the batting of two bowlers this year—Dickinson and Webster— which nearly upset an exciting Oxford win.
Reviving an old skill can be one of the charms of captaincy. How often an experienced hand has broken up a doughty partnership in the course of an over or two tossed up as an experiment! Ashdown, of Kent, was an adept at this, while Iddon, a year or so back, won a valuable game with a resur- rection of his cunning slows. Worthington and Townsend can both still change the aspect of a game ; and in this very season Paynter has taken an important odd wicket. Of those who now chiefly bat, we shall certainly see more of Compton at the bowling crease. It is an easy prophecy that he will take wickets in Australia.
Compton, Hutton and—only a shade less certainly—Wright are now established England players of the future, the nucleus round which, so it must seem to the optimistic, a stirring team will be built. The doldrums of the early Twenties (a dull age if ever there was one) are now old history, and if the Forties are not glowing it will be the fault of other internationals than those in flannels.
Those who groan at the decline of the amateur have had their fill of gloom this season, when the only amateur of the first rank on present form is the England captain. No other, indeed, can be considered for a key place in the Test eleven. It is true that nowadays few are able to play long enough to establish themselves: but it is equally to the point that the professional, by and large, has immensely improved in skill as well as in status. There may not be more giants now than in the past, but the general level of skill is as high, if not higher. Time has proved a teacher ; while 1939 may show itself almost a minor peak in the history of the game, since the increase in public interest has been enormous. Consider- ing that cricket is largely, though not exclusively, a masculine pursuit, and has to compete with the universal lawn-tennis, this is a triumph, no less. It is not long since greybeards were saying that the game was decaying. What a pleasure it is to show them wrong.
Of the West Indians much has been written, but no praise could be too high for the classic Headley. He carried the batting of his side in both innings of the first Test Match, and his twin centuries, had they been made for a strong Australian eleven, would have swelled in actual figures, and would have been compiled with an ease impossible to a bats- man bearing so much on his shoulders. Headley would honour a current world eleven. Cameron is another hero, one whose mere figures do him no sort of justice ; while Constantine, like Tate and Hendren of a few seasons ago, has the great gift of keeping his audience happy—on the simmer. Such men do much to make spectators remember that cricket is a game, even if it is also a religion.
Lastly, Goddard, by no means for the first time, has proved himself indispensable to the selectors. He is now almost a veteran, and he is one more proof that bowlers (like other good gifts of life) are apt to improve with age. OLIVER WARMER.
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