Cricket. Horace Gordon Hutchinson
of playing on perfect wickets in matches that last as many days as you please has had its effect, and to us not altogether a pleasing effect, on the Australian batting, but this is scarcely the place to consider that feature of the case.
The first point of interest to notice is that Beldham is quite at one with us in attributing the advance in batting to the advance of bowling, notably to the wonderful bowling of Harris, which was of that portentous character to which the name of epochmaking is not misapphed, and Nyren is of the same opinion with Beldham, whom he considers to have been the first to play Harris's bowling with success by getting out to it at the pitch.
We have seen, in another part of the book, that, setting aside the stool-ball, and the other legendary sports of the ancients, which were "not cricket," the first game worthy of the name of cricket that appears in the dim twilight of history is the game they played at the beginning of the eighteenth century—say for simplicity's sake in 1700. In 1700 and for some time later the wicket that men bowled at was formed, as we have seen, of two stumps, each 1 foot high, 2 feet apart, and with a cross-stump by way of a bail laid from one to the other. Between the two stumps, and below the cross one, was a hole scraped in the ground—the primitive block-hole. There was no popping-crease: the batsman grounded his bat by thrusting the end of the bat into the block-hole. Then he was "in his ground." But if the wicket-keeper, or any fieldsman, could put the ball into the hole before the batsman had his bat grounded in it, the batsman was out. Observe, it was not a matter of knocking off the cross-stump with the ball, but of getting the ball into the hole before the batsman grounded his bat in it. It takes no very vivid imagination to picture the bruised and bloody fingers that must have resulted from the violent contact of the bat when there was a race for the block-hole between wicket-keeper and batsman.
And the bowling? The bowling of course was bowling, all along the ground, as in the famous old game of bowls. Very likely it was in some respects the best sort of bowling for the business. With a wicket only a foot high, anything between the longest of long-hops or the yorkiest of yorkers would have jumped over it. They found out this disadvantage later, when they began to bowl "length" balls, which, after all is said, must have been far the more puzzling for the batsman. And besides the chance of going over the wicket, there was also the excellent opportunity of going through the wicket, between two stumps set as far apart as 2 feet. Probably this occurred so often that it did not seem particularly hard luck. The batsman, more probably, deemed himself very hardly used if he did not get two or three extra lives of this grace.
And after all, though no records that I can find have come down to us from those times, it is safe to infer that the batsmen did not make an overwhelming number of runs. Had it been so we should almost certainly have heard of it by oral tradition, and Aylward's great score of 167 at the end of the century would not have stood out as such a unique effort. Nor have we far to seek for the reason that the scores were not prodigious. Though the wicket was low, it was very broad, and a ball running over the surface of bumpy ground, as we may suppose those wickets to have been, would very often have taken off the cross-stump only a foot above the ground. Perhaps, even, at a foot high it was more assailable than at two feet by these methods of attack. Then too the weapons of defence—the bats, so to call them—are figured more like the hockey-sticks of to-day—"curved at the back, and sweeping in the form of a volute at the front and end," Mr. Ward's memoranda of Nyren say. Of course these were very inadequate weapons of defence, and in point of fact no defence seems ever to have been attempted. It was all hit. And for actual hitting of a ball always on the ground a bat of this shape may not have been so very ill adapted after all.
We do not know what the wiles of these old all-along-the-ground bowlers may have been. Probably they were fairly simple. Yet there is a significant word that crops up in the pages of Pycroft, that delightful writer, that almost inclines one to suspect these old-fashioned fellows of some guile. He constantly uses the expression "bias" bowling. He speaks of it, it is true, in connection with "length" balls, breaking from the pitch. But why should he have used the word "bias" unless it were in common parlance, and how should that singular word have come into common parlance unless from the analogy of the game of bowls, in which it is a cant term. In the game of bowls the bowls are sometimes weighted on one side, for convenience in making them roll round in a curve and so circumvent another bowl that may "stimy" them, to borrow a term from golf, from the jack; but sometimes—and this seems a more scientific form of the game—there is no bias in the bowl itself, but "side" can be communicated to it, by a finished player, with the same result as before. Now if it was the habit of these old-fashioned cricketers to bowl their "daisy-cutters" with bias on the ball, so that it would travel in a curve as it came along, the reason for the term as used by Pycroft is simple enough; but if this is not the explanation, the only alternative one is that the term first came into use—never having been mentioned in cricket before—for balls that broke from the pitch, wherein the analogy from bowls would be very far-fetched indeed, and the term altogether not one that would be likely to suggest itself. Therefore I think there is a likelihood—I claim no more for my inference—that these old cricketers bowled their underhand sneaks with spin on them, just as we often have seen them bowled—and a very good ball too on a rough wicket—in country cricket matches to-day.
Then we come to a change, and the date of that change appears to involve some of the highest authorities in a certain disagreement. But I am going to stick to Nyren, or rather to Mr. Ward's memoranda as edited by Nyren, rather than to Pycroft, both because the former wrote nearer to the date of the occurrences treated of, and also because the latter—though I love and revere his book—seems to me to have lumped dates together in a certain scornful, contemptuous haste, as if they were scarcely worth a good cricketer's attention, Nyren, or Mr. Ward for him, is more careful in his discrimination, according to my judgment as a grave historian.
According to Nyren, then, it was some time about or before 1746 that the stumps were both heightened and narrowed. From 1 foot they sprang up to 22 inches in height, and from 2 feet across they shrank to as httle as 6 inches in width. A bail crossed their tops, and a popping-crease was drawn for the grounding of the bat, to the great saving, as we cannot doubt, of the wicket-keeper's fingers. Still, however, unless Nyren was mistaken, there were not as yet but two stumps—virtually it is certain he was mistaken in declining to believe that the game ever was played with a wicket of 2 feet width, but that does not prove him wrong in another matter in which all the probabilities are in his favour.
We are not given any very clear reason for this change in the height of wickets, but we very quickly see its effects. Hitherto bowling had been all along the ground, the wicket being so low that it was almost necessary to bowl in this now derided fashion if it was to be hit at all. But a wicket 10 inches higher might have its bail taken off by a higher-rising ball, the higher-rising ball was found to be a more difficult one for the batsman to hit, the higher-rising kind of ball was thereby proved the best for the bowler's purpose; in a word, "length" bowling, as they called it—the bowling of good length balls, as we should say—was introduced.
And now, all at once, the position of the unfortunate batsman was found to be a very parlous one indeed. For, remember, he had in his hand, to meet this bowling, a thing that had more resemblance to a hockey-stick than a cricket-bat. There is a certain "invisible length" which, as we all know, is extremely difficult to play with a modern square-faced bat and with all the science of modern theories of wielding it. How much more helpless then, as Euclid would put it, must the unfortunate man with the bandy-stick have felt when he saw coming towards him through the air a ball of that length which he knew would make it impossible when it reached him. Batsmen must have had a most miserable time of it for a year or two.
At length, out of their necessity was produced a new invention. It was about the year 1750 that the "length" bowling came into fashion, and very soon afterwards the form of the cricket-bat was altered to that straight and square-faced aspect which gave it a chance of meeting the new bowling—which was assailing comparatively new wickets—on equal terms. Obviously there ought to be some kind of relation between the shape of the bat and the contour of the wicket that it is concerned to defend, and the contour of the upright 22-inch wicket demanded defence by a straight bat—that is to say, at first, merely a bat straight in itself. The gospel of the left elbow up and the meeting of the ball with bat at the perpendicular