to batting: at any rate, if they intend to keep on foot their annual match with the professionals, they ought to try their hand at bowling every now and then, if only for the purpose of preventing such preposterous defeats as have been witnessed. Some few years ago the sides were much more equal:[1] but since it has been common to employ professional bowlers in almost every match, the bowling of the Gentlemen has more and more fallen off, and the victory of the Players been more and more made safe. As a preventive of the ludicrous defeats which are sustained, I see a writer in “Bell’s Life” suggests that matches should in future be played by eighteen Gentlemen against eleven Players, or else that numbers should be equal, but the Gentlemen should have a brace of bowlers given them. This, of course, would make the sides more equal than they have been, but the match could be no longer viewed with special interest, nor regarded as a trial of our amateur opposed to our professional strength and skill. For my own part, I detest a game where there are more than eleven in the field. Cricket, to be cricket, must be played by two elevens: and each side should be truly that which it is called. If the Gentlemen play the Players, they should all of them be gentlemen, and not let their hardest work be done by bowlers from the other side.
The plan of hiring a professional as bowler to a club no doubt tends very much to the improvement of the batsmen; but I regret to see it made, as it is often, an excuse for gentlemen to give up bowling altogether, and for getting it done for them, not merely upon practice days, but when they play a match. Generally speaking, more depends upon the bowler than on any other man; and when the Ballborough Eleven brag of having smashed the Stumpington, I incline to give the laurels where they are justly due, and to chronicle that Slowsure, the Ballborough paid bowler, proved a better man than Roundshot, the professional of Stumpington. Why men don’t practise bowling, merely for the pleasure of it, is more than I, who used to revel in it, can pretend to guess. If you play simply for exercise, as many a man does, a few overs will do more for you in sudorification than will any other field-work; and as for fancying that a bowler only comes in for hard work, and has no real enjoyment in it, the man who can say that has never drawn a wicket.
Batting is well enough, and there is certainly a savage sort of luxury in making a good slashing hit; but of all the joys of cricket none equals the delight of scattering the stumps. You feel the same kind of pleasure as when you win a well-contested game of chess. You pit yourself against a man, and he defies you, and you beat him, and when his wicket falls, you feel yourself superior, and your glory is the more because you say, “Alone I did it!” I think the joy of ripping out the middle stump of a good batter surpasses even that of wiping a man’s eye at an overhead cock-pheasant, going down wind at the rate of forty miles a minute, or of clearing an ugly-looking brook or bit of timber, which has been a baulk to some of the best-mounted in the field.
It is a great pity, I think, that bowling is not practised more than it now seems to be, and that young players are not warned that pace is not by any means the most important point to aim at. It would seem now that in bowling there’s a mania for speed, as there is in dancing, hunting, and in shooting. But the old waltz is by far more graceful than the deux-temps, and the best of shots and riders must acknowledge that good sport is often sacrificed to pace. So the fastest balls prove often less effective than the slowest, and have this further disadvantage that, by mere force of recoil, they fly further when hit. Moreover, as a rule, a man can bowl more steadily when he does not strain himself to keep up a great pace, and many a match is lost by the bowlers putting on too much steam at the first, and thereby tiring themselves out before they have half done their work. “Take it easy,” is the best of rules for a young bowler: and, however hot the day be, mind you keep your temper cool. When once a bowler gets “put out,” he will have small chance of putting out the batter, and the safest thing to do with him is to treat him as a tea-kettle, and, directly he shows signs of boiling over, take him off.
Whether it be worth paying a couple of hundred pounds a-year for the privilege of learning to pull well and play cricket, is a point which I shall leave to Her Majesty’s Commissioners who are appointed to inquire into the state of education at Winchester and Eton and our other public schools. It is, however, certain that whatever other benefits their system may confer, it tends more than any other to make good oarsrnen and good cricketers. Excepting in the holidays, we at Greyfriars had small chance of getting up our rowing, but for cricket we went in with all our spirit and our strength; and, considering the limited extent of the Lark’s grassplat, which served us for a cricket-field, our prowess at the game was, to say the least, praiseworthy, and such as any old Greyfriars man might well feel proud to see. It was a great grief, I remember, that we could not test our strength at Lord’s, by playing in the annual tripartite scholastic games. Eheu fugaces! other memories than ours must now bewail those happy times! What could have induced the masters of those other schools to forbid a pleasant meeting which both men and boys looked forward to and annually enjoyed, it is not my present province to inquire. But I cannot help dropping a tear of sympathy for those who, being Wykehamists, must have felt the loss even more than I, though every public schoolman has reason to bewail it.
But though we at Greyfriars could never play at Lord’s among the “glorious Three,” we had our annual matches of the Past versus the Present, the Men against the Boys. And jolly meets they were, and are, too, I doubt not; only I fear the roundshot bowling has somewhat rubbed the fun out. Oh! how for days beforehand we would talk about the match, and watch with growing interest the practising of our Eleven, who trained daily for the game. And then, when the day came, how hastily we swallowed down our lunch- ↑ The matches which were played in the years 1842, 1843, 1846, 1848, 1849, and 1853, were all of them decided in favour of the gentlemen, who since the year last mentioned have not won a single match.
