Cricket (Lyttelton, 1898)/Chapter 2
II
BOWLING
To get a side out you require two bowlers at least; one at each end, and nine fields, whose places must be arranged according as the circumstances require. Bowling is the most difficult of the arts of cricket to acquire; indeed, so difficult that of it may almost, though not quite, be said, "Nascitur, non fit." You cannot learn from others, or acquire by practice nearly so much for the improvement of your bowling as for that of your batting. Some bowlers have a natural curl in the air, some a break, some a great spin on the ball; but these are all natural gifts, and I have known many instances of their departing as suddenly and as unaccountably as they came. A bowler can acquire by diligent practice a certain command over the pace and direction of the ball—great and important characteristics for any bowler—but without the aid of one or the other of the natural gifts no man can hope to be a great bowler. There are other causes of success for bowlers; one of these is action, and one which cannot readily be altered. But, whilst some actions make it easy for batsmen to see the ball, others make it difficult; so that it often happens that though one bowler has more spin, more break, as much accuracy, and, in a word, is a better bowler than another, the other has an action which makes it difficult for the batsman to judge the length of the ball. In the long-run, therefore, though the latter is the worse bowler of the two, he is the more successful one. Left-hand bowlers seem to bowl round the wicket more than do right-hand bowlers; consequently there is no umpire, white-coated or otherwise, in the line of sight, and such are nearly always easy to see. Tall men, like Lohmann and Spofforth, who deliver their balls from a great height, bowl in such a way that it is difficult to judge the length, and spectators may see this for themselves. Lohmann, for instance, as you sit in the ring, seems to bowl what look like half-volleys and yorkers, but when the batsmen play them you see that before the ball gets to their distance it drops straight down. This sort of ball is very difficult indeed to judge, and was one of the many qualities that made Lohmann the great bowler that he was. W. G. Grace has a long arm, which is extended at full length, and such bowling round the wicket often deceives batsmen in the direction of the ball, which looks as if it was good to hit to leg; the ball, however, being on the leg stump, l.b.w. is the result. Wright, of Kent, has a natural curl in the air, a characteristic very rarely found; and Mr. King, one of the Philadelphian Eleven, has the same; but this much is clear in these days of beautiful smooth wickets—that mere mechanical accuracy of length is not sufficient to get a first-class eleven out, and on this point it is well to consider the great Australian bowlers; and the disastrous campaign in Australia in 1897-8.
Australian cricket is played on altogether different lines to English; for though the season is longer, yet, communication being difficult, matches are not played every day, as in England, and matches are played to a finish regardless of time. The climate is hot, and the wickets are very hard and easy—speaking of the three chief towns of Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. As a general rule, therefore, to bat is easy, and to bowl difficult. Necessity, however, being the mother of invention, the Australian bowlers turned their heads to account, and the result has been a revolution in the game. The early giants among Australian bowlers were Boyle, Spofforth, and Palmer. Boyle was a slowish bowler, excellent of his class, but not strikingly different from English bowlers of an earlier date—Caffyn, for instance. But Spofforth and Palmer were reckoned fast, and Spofforth was the first of fast bowlers who, without altering his action, altered his pace; while Palmer was the first of fast bowlers who had the capacity of making the ball break from leg—his natural break, like Spofforth's, being the usual one from the off. To these two bowlers I think cricketers generally will give the credit of being the pioneers of that great development of the game which may be said to be a recognition of the fact that more than mere dry precision is required to get batsmen out on good wickets. A. G. Steel, who began playing first-class cricket in 1878, Giffen, Lohmann, and many others have successfully adopted the same tactics; and it may be noted that while in the old days every bowler belonged to a class—fast, medium, or slow—to classify them now is difficult, for many bowlers seem to be able to bowl all three paces. Haigh, the Yorkshireman, seems now to be the best changer of pace without change of action. One thing, however, is obvious, and that is that the invariable slow bowler seems for the present to be extinct, unless Tyler be the exception. Bennett, Southerton, Buchanan, &c., were all slow, relying on break, length, and judicious placing of the field for their success; while all the fast bowlers hammered away at the same pace, and, helped by the wickets, were difficult and sometimes dangerous to play.
If I had to train a youngster to bowl, I should first of all practise him to bowl a good length and within his strength. If he had a natural break, I should try and get him to acquire the power of varying his pace, keeping the same action, and, if a very apt pupil, to accustom himself to alter the height of his arm. Attewell has this power to a certain extent, and a very useful gift it is. But I feel convinced (and to prove it you need only look at the high rate of scoring in these days) that the principle of variety must be the essence of the bowling art, as long as these perfect wickets are to be the rule, and the days of mechanical accuracy are past; and these remarks seem justified by what has happened in Australia, where Hearne and Richardson have proved to be harmless.
Scoring being on such a gigantic scale, I am tempted to ask what has become of the old-fashioned lob. I fully admits even with the astonishing success of Humphreys, of Sussex, before me, that it is well not to rely upon a lob bowler as your sheet anchor, but I am convinced that every side would be materially strengthened if a good lob bowler were to be numbered among the eleven. Formerly there were a good many first-rate lob bowlers in England. William Clarke, V. E. Walker, Goodrich, Tinley, Mordaunt, Rose, and Ridley were all first-rate; and many other bowlers were very useful, though not first-rate, in this department—such as Iddison, Mudie, and others. I believe modern batsmen would be found to play the best lobs better than the old players; but still to this day there are many cricketers I could name who seem to me to play lobs worse than they do any other sort of delivery. When a player is well set and going strong. he is apt to pooh-pooh the idea of lobs being anything but contemptible, and slog and play recklessly at them, either flying out at a short ball and getting stumped, or else getting caught at deep field by a judiciously placed man. But more important still is the effect that lob bowlers have on nervous batsmen, and, as I have said before, all batsmen are nervous when they first go in. If I had a good lob bowler on my side, I should put him on to every new batsman on his first going in; and this procedure was, I believe, adopted by Murdoch in the case of Humphreys with the greatest success.
Lob bowlers cannot break both ways. This, I think, is quite true, and, roughly speaking, they may be divided into two classes—those who, like Ridley, bowl chiefly on the off stump, and break away, and have seven or eight fields on the off side; and those who, like Humphreys, keep on the on side. It may be asked. Why not combine the two styles? The answer is. You can, but if you do you want more than eleven fields: you do not try and bowl men out, but tempt them to hit, and if you bowl off balls, the batsmen has to get the ball away from eight men—not an easy thing to do; while, if both styles be adopted, you have only four men on each side, and then a lob bowler becomes expensive.
For years past the strength of the professional has been in bowling, but never since I began to watch and take an interest in cricket have I seen amateurs and professionals so nearly equal in this respect as they are now, in 1897. No doubt Richardson is the finest fast bowler; but if you take the first half-dozen from both ranks, the difference is not so great as it used to be. Richardson, Mold, Hearne, Haigh, and Attewell may be the five best professional bowlers, and no doubt they are far ahead of Jessop, Cunliffe, Bull, Woods, and Townsend, but not so far as used to be the case; and though I hope my younger friends who play cricket now will not be offended, I am bound to say that I think English bowling of all sorts has never been so weak during the past forty years as it is at the present time. I honestly do not think that there is a single really first-class bowler in England at the present day; but I think, also, that this state of things is not altogether the bowler's fault. We have just passed through a cycle of dry years, and the splendid wickets have broken bowlers' hearts. That is one reason. Another lies in the fact that Richardson, who in 1895 could safely be reckoned with Jackson and Freeman as constituting the three finest fast bowlers the world has ever seen, has since that time had too much bowling; and personally, I do not believe that any bowler, however powerfully made, can last long with such an amount of work as that Richardson has had to do. In 1895, in first-class matches alone, for the most part on hard wickets, he bowled 1690 overs, while in Australia the winter following he bowled 618, and in the summer following, in England, he bowled 1656 more, these overs being of five balls. He was pretty nearly a fixture at the end for Surrey, and whenever he played against the Australians. Just to compare a season's work in former days, I take a casual year, 1871, and I find that only two bowlers bowled over 6000 balls in a season, and they were both slow—Shaw and Southerton—and 1200 balls made a fair season's work for fast bowlers; while Richardson, with only two breaks of six weeks for the voyage to and from Australia, between May 1895 and September 1896, bowled 19,820 balls, quite apart from any scratch match and balls at practice, and all this at a great pace and with a long run. I do not believe any but slow and medium-pace bowlers can stand this, and grand bowler though Richardson was in 1896, he was better in 1895. As he has gone out to Australia again this winter, and has had to bowl in an abnormally hot season on the losing side, I feel very sure that he will never be the great bowler that he once was, and he is only twenty-eight this year. Too much bowling, then, on the one hand, and glorious wickets on the other, have, I think, rather knocked the bowlers' hearts to pieces. We have had a cycle of dry years; matches run into three days; the prominent cricketers have often to travel all or part of a night to begin another three days' match. It is too much for them, and if bowlers of a former generation had had this amount of work to do, they could not have lasted in the way they did. But two or three wet seasons, like 1888 and 1890, would bring about a very different state of things.
I am no laudator temporis acti. I believe that, given the same wickets, our bowlers would be able to prove themselves every bit as good as the giants of old; and in one particular there can be no doubt that bowlers of the present day are far superior to those of the former generations, and that is in accuracy. To take one illustration, no bowler bowls a ball to leg now. The batsman, if he wants to hit in that direction, must pull a straight ball. This might have been the case with the old slow bowlers, but it certainly never was with the fast ones. One of the earliest matches I ever saw was Gentlemen and Players, in 1866. Grundy, notoriously one of the straightest bowlers in England, medium pace, right hand, was bowling to A. H. Winter, who hit him three or four times to leg in two overs, and this was leg-hitting of the orthodox type, being hit off balls bowled to leg, and not pulled. George Parr was famous for his leg-hitting, so also was Mr. Mitchell, and later still Oscroft; but who can be said to be the best leg-hitter now? No Parr or Mitchell is possible in these days, when the accuracy of the bowlers has driven leg-hitting out of cricket.
The greatest fast bowlers of the years between i860 and 1875 were Jackson, Tarrant, Freeman, Atkinson, and Willsher; and of these Willsher lasted much the longest, and was always a grand bowler. But there were a great number of magnificent fast bowlers during those years. J. C. Shaw, Wootton, Emmett, Howitt, Griffith, and a host of others were all high-class bowlers, but of first-class slow bowlers there were not so many. Alfred Shaw began a medium fast bowler and finished a slow; and Southerton, Bennett, Arkwright, and Plowden were four famous names as slow bowlers. Richardson in these days is worthy, judging by his past feats, of being reckoned with the best. Peate, of Yorkshire, was the best length bowler I ever saw; but taking all wickets and all conditions, I regard Spofforth as the best bowler that ever lived, and Lohmann the second.