Cricket 1905

242 CRICKET: A WEEKLY RECORD OF THE GAME. J uke 6, 1905. obstructed.” With regard to this inci­ dent, Mr. Wilson said :—“ The ball came to me low down from Hollins, off P. R. Johnson’s bowling, and I caught it three or four inches from the ground. Marsham, who was batting at the other end, appealed, quite rightly. The umpire at the bowler’s end was baulked by John­ son, while the square-leg umpire could not see on account of the wicket-keeper. It was terribly bad luck for us, but it was the fortune of war. If either umpire had been able to see what had happened, we Bhould almost certainly have won the match.” “ You went to the West Indies with Mr. Leveson-Gower’ s team ? ” “ We had some very interesting exper­ iences there, but it was too hot for my welfare. There were some startling changes of climate, and I remember that once we played at Georgetown, in Demerera, v. British Guiana when there had been 17 inches of rain on the previous day—I am not exaggerating. The sun blazed out at about Sve in the mom iog, and after it had been at work for a short time a whole army of black men mopped up the water with sacks and sponges and carried it away in buckets. By 2 p.m. the game was resumed on a somewhat difficult wicket. I cannot see why something of the same kind of thing should not be done in England after a heavy storm—it might unduly prejudice the chances of the batting side, but in the long run this would right itself, for each team would have its share of luck, just as it does with winning and losing the toss.” “ You will remember,” continued Mr. Wilson, “ that Bosanquet went with us to the West Indies. After a very short time we saw that he couldn’t get his length with sbws, and pointed out to him that three or four overs of them might easily lose any match for us—150 after rain is a winning score in the tropics. So, as we absolutely refused to let him bowl slow, he bowled fast with a great deal of success. But on board ship, with the shorter distance, he could do anything he liked with the india-rubber ball which is used.” Mr. Wilson first went to the prepara­ tory school at Bilton Grange, of which the Rev. Walter Earle was headmaster. But, young as he was, he had already learned to play cricket in something like a scientific manner, thanks to the coach­ ing which he received from his> elder brothers at home. “ I always think it is most important for youngsters, when they are eight or ten years old,” he said, “ to play on a short pitch of about sixteen yards with a composition ball. Such a ball goes easily off the bat and does not hurt the batsman as much as a cricket ball, so that a small boy learns to make strokes without fear. And when he gets to school it is of even greater importance that he should have good wickets to praotise on. I have never tiied matting wiokets for practice, but I should ima­ gine that they would be very useful in schools where the composition of the soil or state of the turf makes it impossible to prepare a good wioket. “ In my opinion,” said Mr. Wilson, “ the off-side strokes should be taught before those on the on-side. The stroke of primitive man must have been to the on-side, for you will always find that the natural tendency of the small boy is to pull everything. My theory is that a boy will never have any difficulty in learning all the on-side strokes if he has once mastered those on the off-side, for they will come natural to him. There is without doubt a tendency in these days to play almost entirely on the on-side—a tendency which may perhaps be in­ directly due to the great ascendency of C. B. Fry—and there is much to be said in favour of this on the score of safety. On the other hand there are so many scoring strokes to be made on the off­ side, that it is sad to find how seldom one sees nowadays the brilliant hits of a few years ago. I entirely agree with Mr. E. H. Buckland, who, as you know, has been a master here for many years, that, as far as boys are concerned, it is well to teach them how to make runs in front of the wicket; they will always make them behind the wicket from a natural instinct. School cricket ought to be attractive to watch, and it is better that it should be too free than too cautious. After he has left school a batsman can always settle down to play a merely safe game if he wishes to do so, but unless he has learned at school to know how to play an attractive game he will certainly never learn it later.” “ In schoolboys who play golf as well as cricket have you noticed anything which would tend to show that the one game interferes with the other P” “ I have noticed in schoolboys that there is a very decided tendency in these days to bend the right knee when bat­ ting. I feel pretty sure that this is caused by golf. Another characteristic of modern batting is finishing up with the blade over the shoulder as with the club in golf. A third characteristic is that with many players the point of the bat is raised, and then follows the line of a semicircle before it comes down to the perpendicular, when a stroke is about to be made. These mistakes, even if they do not arise from golf, are certainly exaggerated by it. But, in any case, golf is a very pleasant game to play.” _ “ You were at Rugby School at the time when Tom Emmett was coach ? ” “ Yes. I suppose he must have been about fifty-five or six years old then, but he could bowl so well that it was easy to imagine how good he must have been in his prime. Even then he had a horrible ball which came with his arm in the most bewildering manner. We were very fortunate at Rugby in having a good friend in Mr. John Stanning of Leyland, who had much to do with bringing Jack Sharp, Albert Ward, I’Auson and many others to the front. His son was afterwai ds in the Cambridge eleven. Ttianks to Mr. John Stanning, we had Alec Watson and other profes­ sionals to coach us in the summer. Alec was a splendid coach. “ You did not go to Cambridge im­ mediately after you left school r ” “ No. I went up a year later. I was very fortunate in having a better oppor­ tunity than most men of coming to the front, for although I made some runs in the Freshmen’s match I was not chosen to play against A. J. Webbe’s X I. But I was asked to play for our opponents and was lucky enough to make a hundred in the first innings. It is not as easy to get one’s blue as some people seem to think, for a man has to be in form for a long time when he is fighting for his place, and must keep getting runs sometimes right up to the end of June. It is generally considered to be bad policy for a captain to give a man his blue early in the season on account of a single fine performance, for there are so many men who can do a brilliant thing once, but don’t seem able to last.” When Mr. Wilson began to play for Cambridge the critics were not at all impressed with his bawling, and many hard things were said about him. “ I had to put up with a great deal of chaff at first,” he said. “ The Evening News jumped on me with ‘ Wilson serves up a slow, tired-looking sort of ball,’ and most of the critics made very disparaging remarks about me. But the worst was to come when I first met ‘ W.G.’ He came up to Cambridge to play against us for London County at the end of May in 1900, and at the end of the first inn­ ings he said, ‘ W ell! Of all the bad bowlers I’ve ever seen this fellow is the very worst.’ But I don’t think I bowled any worse than usual that day. You can easily imagine that I heard a good deal about that remark from the other mem­ bers of the Cambridge team. But per­ haps the Doctor himself has not altogether forgotten the remark, for since then I ’ve got him out five times, twice with the first ball I bowled to him.” “ Do you like bowling as well as batting ? ” “ I prefer it to batting. In fact, I like bowling immensely. When I was captain at Cambridge I bowled so much at one end that it became known as Wilson’s end. But there was some excuse for me, for we were very short of bowlers that year. There is a notion which is general, that the ’Varsity match cannot be won without a fast bowler, and I believe that the match of 1902 was the only one of recent years won by a side which relied almost entirely on two slow bowlers. As a bowler, I could never understand why a batsman is con­ sidered to be so unlucky if he plays on or is bowled off his pads. If he plays on it is evident that he does not time the ball quite accurately, which means that the bowler has beaten him just sufficiently to get his wicket, and if he tries to hit a ball to square leg instead of mid-on, and is bowled off his pads, surely he deserves to be out for making such a mistake. Yet in these cases the bowler is held up as an extremely lucky individual, while the batsman is said to have the hardest of lines.” Mr. Wilson was once third in the hat trick in the match between Cambridge and the Australians. “ Hopkins bowled