Southerners at any rate will be sorry Middlesex failed to
make itself champion county, and even Yorkshiremen, I imagine, would have hailed that result with the same sort of indulgent acquiescence with which Cambridge men receive an occasional Oxford victory in the boat-race. It is idle to compare the two teams man by man, and even if Middlesex should win the friendly match arranged with Yorkshire at the Oval it would not prove that the Lord's team was the better, for the championship must obviously be based on a season's record, and not on the chances of a single game. But there is a great deal of force in the contention of a former secretary of Worcestershire (in a letter in Tuesday's Morning Post) that the first six counties in the final championship table should all play each other in the following year, and all play 28 matches. This year Middlesex only played 24 matches against Yorkshire's 28, and it can be argued that Yorkshire has therefore undergone the more searching test. Middlesex can at any rate face 1938 cheerfully in the possession of two particularly promising young players in Edrich and Compton, the latter of whom has been nursed along at Lord's since he was an elementary schoolboy.
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