Cricket 1896

J an . 30, 1896. CRICKET: A WEEKLY RECORD OF THE GAME I SHOULD fancy that Mr. I. D. Walker, who went out to Australia for a trip in company with the young Old Harrovian, G. P. G jre—the latter to recruit his health after a long illness—should be on his way home again by this time. Just before Christmas the two Old Harrovians were at Melbourne with the intention of making a brief visit to Tasmania. I. D. had had one game in Sydney, and one on the Wesley College Ground in Melbourne with at least one well-known cricketer, Mr. Freeman Thomas, of Cambridge and Sussex fame in the game. P ersonally I am pleaded to find that I. D. expressed to an old Victorian cricketer a high opinion of Frank Allan— “ the bowler of a century ” —of the first Australian! Team. He considered Allan, in fact, to be one of the finest bowlers he had ever batted against. In another opinion of his a good many of us will be heartily in accord. He is confident that a good, slow, underhand bowler would be very destructive now. It is a pity, indeed, for many reasons, that Walter Humphreys, veteran though he is, has been relegated to the retired list. I p scores of two hundred are rare on the run-getting wickets of Adelaide, Mebourne, and Sydney, innings of over three hundred during a season can pretty well be counted on one’s fingers. For that reason alone special prominence should be given to any per­ formance of the kind. S. R. Walford, the captain of the Central Cumberland Club of Sydney, is the latest to get into the fourth hundred in an innings as far as I know. He made 308 against the Ryde Club on November 9th, at Sydney. A nother performance which wants a lot of doing, no matter what the quality of the cricket, is the taking of all ten wickets. It is well to perpetuate curios of this kind, if only for the benefit of the cricket statistician. According to the Adelaide Observer, C. Sullivan took all ten wickets for Fillarton against Norwood Albert for 22 runs, and with the hat trick thrown in. Sicitur. T. R otjtledge , a fine batsman, who never came up to his real form during the tour of the South African team in England in 1894, was much to the fore in the way of scoring at Johannesburg, on Dec. 7th. He was playing for theWanderers against the Diggers in the Senior Cup Match, his share of a total of 36Lfor six wickets was no less than 201. A fter all, as was only to be expected in view of the Australian visit, the cricket fathers in Philadelphia have deemed it advisable to defer their project of sending theGentlemen of Philadelphia to England during the coming summer. The decision is wise, for it would hardly have been possible to have arranged a programme worthy of the present reputation of American cricket. The International Committee have definitely announced their intention to send a team to England next year, and are hopeful of being able NEXT ISSUE, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27th.