1899 we had a capital object-lesson. The whole season, after the month of May, the ground was dry and the wickets hard and fast; the result has been to show that bowling cannot be made sufficiently good to enable matches to be finished in three days.
The Australian batting of 1878 was, taken all through, of a rough and unscientific nature, but a year's cricket in England made a vast change in the whole stamp of colonial batting. There was one very fine bat in the person of Charles Bannerman, and there was a batsman of style in the person of Murdoch, but that may be said to be all. Their matches were won by the deadliness of their bowling and the activity of their fielding. The smooth wickets of Australia, as I have remarked in another chapter, showed them that it was possible to dispense with a long-stop, and this was one thing that we learned from them. Another point that we learned from them was in regard to bowling. Though Spofforth was not then the bowler of such variety as he afterwards became, he was more variable than any English bowler as far as pace was concerned, and he was
