Cricket 1911

3 4 4 CETCKET: A WEEKLY RECORD OF THE GAME. J u ly 1 5 , 1 9 1 1 . were not out of date, he might be described as a typical bowler of the Notts school—a bowler of the Alfred Shaw and Attewell type. In other words, he believes in length, and can give his belief practical expression. He keeps men playing to or at the pitch of the ball, and has sufficient command of pitch and of pace to be very deceptive. If he can keep a batsman feeling out for him, he has only to vary his pitch and pace very slightly to get him out, especially if the ball does just enough to beat the bat. In which case the batsman will have the added mortification of seeing the ball do that little which carries it past the bat and into the wicket. If the match did nothing else, it showed that in Iremonger we have just the bowler for the long-drawn-out cricket of “ Test ” matches in Australia. He is a length-bowler with stamina and that skill in carrying out pace and pitch just to the degree that escapes the eye of the man round the ropes, unless he keeps it fixed on the batsman to note that he plays too soon at one ball which goes aside or past the bat after meeting a dozen plumb in the middle. The miss-hit through the subtle chance of pace is more obvious, but it is not more real than the other mistake achieved by the same deceptive agency. Moreover, the mis-hit may merely be due to human fallibility to mis-time even a half-volley badly. Smith, too, bowled uncommonly well and was not above tempting a batsman by presenting him with a four. Rushby was handicapped by a badly bruised knee as well as by a strained tendon in the heel, yet he bowled so well after lunch that he would have got a wicket or two if he had not been bowling at Spooner and Warner when both were so “ well in.” The fieldiDg was, as I have said, superb, while Strudwick’s keeping could hardly have been better. It was indeed a case of “ Homer nodding ” when he failed to stump Warner when 54. These things will happen if they only serve to show how fallible and how very human the very greatest are. YOUNG Photo by] [Hawkins &• Co., Brighton. M E A D . Gen t lemen v. P la c e r s . the first and second days on which runs could be made with ease. That certain batsmen made the bowling appear to be easy is a compliment to the batsmen without being the opposite to the bowlers. Bowling now counts for everything, and, if the man round the ring thinks that the bowling is easy because a batsman is playing it well, he would be promptly deceived if he suddenly became the man in the middle and had only a bat wherewith to invest the bowling with simplicity and all the defects that make for runs. This certainly applies to the bowling of the Players last Thursday. Spooner could always or nearly always play all the bowling, but even he was occasionally in difficulties and was beaten without being bowled, which is after all much the same as being missed, though it does not make the same direct appeal to the eye and is ever chronicled as a very minor “ blem ish” compared with a direct chance, no matter how good the stroke or what praise the fieldsman merits for getting near the ball’s line of flight at all. What we saw at the Oval on the first day of the match was really good batting—defensive and offensive— against really good bowling backed up by superlatively good fielding alike in anticipation of the stroke and in sheer execution. Run-getting was never easy, and the men who got runs deserved them all and such little share of the incidental luck as went their way. The good length bowling of Iremonger was in itself sufficient to give distinction to the day’s play. Iremonger conjoins stamina with skill, and, if the phrase Photo by] [Hawkins tfc Co., Brighton. R E M N A N T . Turning to the Amateur bowling, Brearley once more demon­ strated that he is our best fast bowler—day in and day out. No other bowler has quite the same stamina, the same self-reliance, the same “ big heartedness,” if one may use the term, In my mind, Brearley ,would have accomplished an even better performance if Fry had not adopted the novel plan of making him bowl over about B y HAMISH STUABT. T h e O val M atch . writer confesses to neither love for nor interest in the big scoring game in which runs are made with ease off bad bowling on a good wicket. But the Oval match between Gentlemen and Players, though a big scoring game, until it reached its final stage did not fall within the description. The wicket was good, but so were the bowling and fielding, and there was only one brief period— the last half-hour or so of the first day—during