SPOUTING ASPECT
The New Cricket Season
THE first matches in the county cricket championship will begin on Saturday. Once again, that is to say, cricket, with a modesty bordering upon the pathetic. has retreated before the inroads of football upon its traditional territory, backing away from Cup Final Saturday as it has already done from all but the fringe of September.
Indeed, after the high excitement and heightened publicity of the Australian summer of 1953, the cricket season-of 1954 has little to attract non-cricketers. The Pakistanis, on their first tour of this country, will surprise everyone, including themselves, if they defeat our Test team. Yet their keen cricket, with brisk bowling and characteristic throwing of bat at ball, may disturb the more staid of ou'r county practitioners. A touring team from South Australia- is described as of ' up-country ' players : Sir Donald Bradman was an Australian ' up-country ' player. They will almost certainly try English sides of less than county strength with some hard cricket and hearty social activities. Meanwhile, a side from Cairada, including three men who have played first-class cricket, has matches with some strong club, minor and county elevens and, in a unique fixture, will meet Pakistan at Lord's .in June.
None of these visitors, fortunately, are likely to bring out the celebrity-hunters and autograph-collectors in such numbers as to expose the inadequacy of the accommodation on our grounds. Indeed, we seem to be promised a summer in which cricketing England may concentrate upon its domestic programme.
Much of such a county season is to the headlines and personalities of an Australian visit as an old claret, in its faded but true gentility, is to the gilded extravagance of champagne.
Some county club balance-sheets may be the more precariously poised next March for this fact, but there will be much cricket of the best contemplative temper. There will be no thunder of Miller and Lindwall to deafen us to the familiar dialogue of R. Perks, of Worcester, bowling to John Langridge, of Sussex, as has been happening now in the summers of some twenty-four years.. Neither expects to surprise the other by any new move. Indeed, each must use all his experience to economise in expenditure of energy. One ball a fraction slower or faster or some extra life in the pitch on the one side, a shrewd avoidance of temptation on the other, will probably settle the matter with unobtrusive skill.
The Welshman, Emrys Dairies, has undertaken once more to investigate the latest developments in new-ball bowling with a bat as warily poised as on hiS first appearance in county cricket, thirty-one years ago.. Meanwhile, lest memory of his illustrious father should be obscured, the Nottinghamshire Hardstaff, now in his forty-third year, will remain, for many. Hardstaff junior. Perhaps a little persuasion, aided by the feeling of the sun on his back will bring the lean and hungry— in a cricketing sense, you understand—Thomas Goddard out once more, to wrap his incredibly long spinning-finger round the hall and appeal for lbW with the old venom. almost enough to suggest that all is well with one small world in the world.
This is not to say that the summer will not know hostilely tempered play. Already there is news of a mustering of Yorkshire cricketers among the smoke stacks. There, they say, the return of Trueman, Appleyard and Close to reinforce the uncomplainingly overworked Wardle will form a versatile bowling column, sternly free from the frivolity of leg-spin. There will be little dozing in the sun where that battle order is deployed : Surrey, Lancashire, Sussex and the balanced Young Leicestershire team will need to look to themselves.
Yet, even in the stress of these three-day wrangles, there will be fields where the villainy of groundsmen imposes the rarefied atmosphere in which the minutiae of batsmanship are endlessly deployed against defensive bowling of barely Perceptible variations.
Still, too, before the small and drowsy crowds of a third day, many a relatively unimportant match will go down quietly to a draw for all that ingenious captaincy can do to gain a result. Then average county players will make sure of their thousand runs for the season—that traditional insurance of another contract—against bowling lacking the malice to deny them that security. It would be a harsh critic who would take away those dusty afternoons when the sound of a child's piano practice floats out of a nearby window to the ears of an umpire feeling the tiredness in his feet and regular bowlers strolling unhurried in the outfield against tomorrow's labours. It is, You will appreciate, a domestic matter; one which spectators may attend if they understand, or ignore if they do not.
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