“Butter Fingers!”

Gisborne Times, Volume VI, Issue 206, 6 September 1901, Page 3

“Butter Fingers!”

“ Cricket criticism for some time past,” wrote Mr Horace Hutchinson early last month, “ha 3 been one loDg-drawn-out wail about the undue advantage that the bat possesses over the ball, abont immense scores and unfinished matches.” In the light of B what has been happening on English cricket • fields during the present month it seems 3 hardly likely that the wail has subsided, i Two or three times a week we hear of extra- ; ordinary scores; last week alone thirty-one 1 “ centuries ” were compiled. To what is this [ state of things to be attributed ? Mr Jessop, as we showed on Saturday, puts it down to the perfection of the pitches provided ' for important matches, but he also quotes with approval E. M. Grace’s remark that if every fieldsman had cobbler’s wax on his hands there would be no complaints about drawn games. This is the theory of another cricketer who writes about the “Lost Art of Catching,” and who declares that modem cricketers not only catch no better than their fathers, but do it a great deal worse. “AVe drop the catches, therefore the men make immense scores. If the catches were held these scores would not be made.” This sounds so very like a truism that it hardly needed a statistical table showing the catches missed in county matches, and that Yorkshire, the champion county, had the best record to prove it. But Air Hutchinson will not at all agree that cricketers miss more catches now-a-days than they used , to do. He declares that as a matter of fact “ no score ever is made or ever was made in the neighbourhood of the three figures without chances, more or less obvious, given and declined.” The rule, if it is one, admits, we should think, of a good many exceptions. So far from agreeing that fieldsmen to-day nre more butter-fingered than their fore-

fathers, this critic believes that on the whole they are a little less so, and that this is due to the example of the Australian teams, especially of some of the earlier ones. The fielding of these men, especially their catching, “ was a wonder and almost a revelation,” and this would not have been tho case had latter-day cricketers received from their forefathers a standard very much higher than their own. Therefore he refuses to believe

that the art of catching is lost, and that huge scores and drawn matches are due to bad fielding. Heavy scoring is the result of tho excellence of wickets, and the only way in which fielding is to be held responsible for it is that “ the man who is missed to-day is as much the more likely to make a big score ” than the man who was missed twenty or thirty years ago would have been. It is, therefore, all the more important that tho fielding should be hotter than it is or ever

has been. Good catches are far too uncommon. There are too many cases in which men “ Most mournfully misjudge a ‘ skyer,’ And lose a match tho Fates cannot restore.”

English cricketers have before them this season, so Mr Hutchinson points out, an admirable proof of tho value of catching. The champion county is very distinctly the county whoso team holds the most catches.”—Press.