It must be a very long time since the batting
averages were headed by two amateurs—the only amateurs included in the first eighteen—and without opportunity to consult the records exhaustively I will risk the assertion that never before were the top two positions held by men who were still • under- graduates when the season opened. I realise that there is not quite finality yet, for P. R. May is only a fraction of a point ahead of Hutton, who, even at this tail-end of the season, has still just time to displace the Cambridge and Surrey player. But since May played an innings of 197 this week and Hutton one of 120 the gap between them has (almost infinitesimally) widened. Yet all this illustrates what is sometimes known as the glorious uncertainty of cricket. In 1952 a, Cambridge XI which included four Test Match players in Sheppard, May, Warr and McCarthy, and one member of the Gentlemen's XI, Marlar, failed to beat Oxford. And in 1951 Cambridge, with all those five players except McCarthy, actually lost to Oxford. Warr, indeed, is the only one of the five who has ever played on the winning side in a University match. Such is cricket.
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