Cricket 1900

390 CRICKET : A WEEKLY RECORD OF THE GAME. S e p t . 6 , 1 9 0 0 . T H E C O U N T Y S E A S O N O F 1 9 0 0 . F or several reasons the season of 1900 has been of unusual interest. It has been remarkable for the consistent play of the Yorkshire and Lancashire teams, as well as for their consistent good fortu n e; for the way in which Surrey fell from the proud position of champions to a place am ong the counties but little above that held by the unhappy possessors of minus percentages; for the wonderful manner in which K . S. Ranjitsinhji and M r. F ry took upon their shoulders aimost the whole burden of S u ssex; for the plucky but T a in attempts of Hampshire to win at least one match. T o h se sixteen matches w ithout w in­ ning at all is a record w lic b , we should imagine, has never been approached, but we fancy that not a voice w ill be raised to suggest that Hampshire should be relegated to the rank of a m inor county. For am ong the counties which have suffered from the absence of men who are lighting for Queen and country they have suffered by far the most, and, unlike Yorkshire, they have no powerful reserve foice to rely upon. N o other county can for a moment be held to have done badly enough to deserve degradation, while the weakest of them have so m any young and prom ising players in their ranks that they are certain to take a much higher place as time goes on. N oth in g during the season has been more astonishing than the success of the Sussex men. Yorkshirem en m ay rejoice in the fact that their county has not lost a match, and the men of Lancashire that they were not beaten by Yorkshire, but for nil that they have not attracted the admiration which has fallen to the lot of tbe “ tw o-m an team ” of Sussex. The result of 4 wins and 18 drawn games does not in the least represent what has been done by the county. The team has got into a tight com er over and over again, and has come off with flying colours, and in such a way that opposing teams have been thanklul that there was no time to play out the match. They have no bowlers to speak of, and no batsmen who are in any way out of the common, with tbe exception of E anjitsinhji and F ry. B u t these two men have done thiugs this season which have made all the world wonder, and it is to them that the thanks of Sussex men are due that their county is bracketed third on tbe list w ith a foi midalile percentage. True, there are sound batsmen in the team in R elf and K iilick, a useful hitter in Bu tt, and an invaluable stayer in M r. Collins, but these men, good as they are, would have been powerless to pull their county through if both of the two famous bats­ men bad often failed in the same match. But it was the peculiarity of both men that they never— hardly ever— failed at the s*me time ; generally they both came off together. On good wickets or bad it was tbe same thing. They made runs when runs were needed, and in this can be compared with the most famous batsmen of old times, who were able to play on all sorts of wickets. The Yorkshire eleven— tbe champion eleven of 1900 —was in almost every respect unlike that of Sussex. It was essentially an “ eleven man team ,” for there was not a man on the side who was not likely to give a good acc"unt of him­ self w ith the bat, while the bow ling strength of the team was enormous. W e cannot do better than quote an estimate of the Yorkshire team which has appeared in tbe Sheffield Daily Telegraph, written by a man who has s< en it from every possible point of view. “ N ot once beaten, never even in trouble at the close, the side which has during the past few seasons grasped so many records has thus annexed another, and tbis perhaps the greatest of them all. One has only to cousiJer how peculiar a game cricket is to be reasonably impressed with the magnitude of the task acco n- plished. It is a gam e whose variations are so great that tbe most surprising results very often obtain, yet the Y o rk ­ shiremen during 1900 have risen superior to all the luck of the game, and no more consistent team has taken the field. It is not a little surprising that such should be the case. A t the outset of the year, with such able cricketers away as Messrs. F . S. Jackson, Frank M itchell, and Frank M illigan— all ‘ doing their country’s work ’ and serving their Queen— no one would have been bold enough to suggest such a march of triumph as the team has had, and even now that all is over and the untarnished record is possessed, one may be pardoned an expression of wonder how it has come about. Probably the reason is a complex one. It is due to the absolute unanim ity which has prevailed in the team , to the positive genius which has marked Lord H aw ke’s captaincy throughout, to the fact that wickets to a considerable extent have favoured our bowlers, and to the almost traditional fact that the team has absolutely no tail. Time after time the team has been in Queer Street, yet one man, or tw o, has come to the rescue, and it is this wonder­ ful north-country pluck which has turned seeming defeats into glorious victories or honourable draws that has stamped the Yorkshire cricket throughout the season. L ook at the records, if proof be needed, and recall H a igh ’s batting achievements against M iddlesex at L ord’s, at Worces­ ter, at Oid Trafford, and at B righton, or of W ainw iigh t’s splendid batting at Old Trafford, at Leicester, and Harrogate against Essex. These two cases are cited because on the season’s whole form neither man could fairly be expected to do what he actually did. They are but proofs of the pluck to which allusion has been made. “ And yet one cannot be satisfied with the batting of the team in many matches as a whole. To say so perhaps savours of seeking for faults in a perfect whole, yet there were m any cases wherein too large a proportion of the runs were made by two or three men, and consistency can hardly be said to have marktd the batting of the side. L eaving out the extras, which would really make the matter more disproportionate still, we find that against Worcester in the first match, three men made 73 out of 99 ; against K ent two made 95 out of 1 6 3 ; against Surrey at Sheffield, two batsmen scored 145 of the 195 ; against Derbyshire three scored exactly the same proportion ; against K ent at Leeds, three made 119 out of 132 ; and against Surrey at the Oval, four men made 330 in a total of 380. Y e t one can afford to take the season’s work as a whole and now ignore such comparative failures by m any of the side. Those who failed are just the ones who succeeded when the effort was called for, and as M r. George Brann truly said at the end of the Brighton match on Saturday, *' There is no getting the Yorkshire team o u t; it is never beaten ! ” Therein has lain its strength ; it has not concentrated its efforts on one huge score (as a matter of fact, the Taunton total of 518 is much the highest of the season), but has done what was wanted match atter match, and been the despair of every side against which it has appeared. “ H ow much of the team ’s success is attributable to Lord Hawke it is hard to sav. Yorkshire is honoured in the possession of a gentleman such as he, w illing to devote the whole four months to the fatiguing duties of a cricket season, and one can but look forward w ith fore­ boding to the time when he m ay deem it necessary to retire. A s a captain he has no equal in the country. H e takes risks in plenty, is a sportsman in cricket as in everything else, and never averse to a sporting finish. W h at m ay be termed • safe tactics ’ never appeal to him , and he revels as does his team in a fight against time, even though the race, so far as his own side is concerned, m ay be a tight one. One never sees in Yorkshire cricket the fatal errors perpetrated by M r.--------. ” But it would, perhaps, be better to cease quotinghere, for w eshouldbe getting into dangerous waters. L et us turn to Lancashire. H ere, again, is an all-round team , with two or three men standing out only a little prom inently. N o one in the team has a higher average than 37, while there are ten men with averages over 20. M r. MacLaren has been able to play regularly, but he has hardly been the MacLaren of former years, for although at times he played magnificent cricket, and may be said to have won two or three matches by his own daring, he was out of form for a long time, and was not as con­ sistent as he used to be. B u t a team in which man after man who comes in to bat has to be reckoned w ith is bound to be exceedingly strong if it has good bowlers to rely upon. Here Lancashire was fortunate, for Briggs, whose cricketing days were, laBt year, thought to be over, was a tower of strength, while new bowlers were found, who could give an excellent account of themselves, M old was at times as irresistible as ever. The fielding of the team was also excellent. Surrey has been freely condemned as possessing a weak-kneed team , but this seems to us to be a m istake. The fates have been against the county, but the team is not a bad one for all that. It is certainly not seen at its best when it has to play on a tricky wicket, but how many teams are seen at