The Return of Cricket

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 997, 13 June 1930, Page 7

The Return of Cricket

PROSPECTS IN ENGLAND “ Stirring Days in The Sun ”

Cricketer,” of the “Mane whose articles on the gap Below is his review of Engl is written before the season had s At this moment of springtime cricket j fields all over the land are growing j fresh grass in the cold winds. The j groundsmen are at work, not always, let us hope, with machines; the old i horse is part of the eternal furniture of a cricket field, his plod-plod as much a true sound of the game as the crack of a bat. And in every field tlie scoreboard stands vacant, a blank tablet —“0 —o—o0 —0” —ready to be written upon by history. We are getting ready for stirring days in the sun: club cricketers, as well as the mighty hunters before the Lord, are eager, worrying about their off-drives and off-spinners, delving down into the underground collars of bat-shops, trying over a new white blade and, as they do so, making most wonderful strokes at imaginary bowling. This is the time of life for lovers of cricket and the fresh air. Summer is waiting for us it stretches like a lane before us. . . . The first-class season is likely to prove multitudinous. Already the newspapers in London are picking the England eleven to play the Australians. And the ancient gramophone plays the ancient record —“Hobbs, Hendren, I-learne. . . We shall see. The Australian team is bracing in its youthfulness. Jackson, Bradman, McCabe, Walker, a’Beckett, Fairfax, Wall are all definitely young men of twenty-live or under. England’s Veterans In pre-war years England’s greatest Test match players were ot* that age or round about. But today our veterans remain our best; it would bo hard to choose, from our young men, a team

capable of beating the following side of middle-aged cricketers: —Hobbs, George Gunn, Holmes, Ernest Tyldesley, Woolley, N. Haig, Rhodes, Smith (of Warwickshire), Freeman, A still, and Kennedy. English cricket missed an opportunity last summer, when against an inexperienced South African side we preferred to keep to safe ways, and declined to trust to players of promise and youth fulness.

If Woodfull can find one really destructive bowler within his ranks Eng-

Tester Guardian, r? is a writer ne are always worth reading, di cricket prospects for 1930, tarted. | land will be hard pressed to hold tlie ! rubber. For there is little doubt that ! the Australians, before the season is j over, will make heaps of runs against ! I our bowling. The South’ Africans were I | able to achieve that much—and they did not possess a Bradman, a Kippax, a Jackson, a Woodfull. I am expecting to see the Australian batsmen setting a good match-winning pace. It is the grossest error to think that Australian batting is slow' in test matches fought over here. The Australians are quick to adapt themselves to circumstances; they do not travel over the wide seas with drawn matches for their purpose. In 1921 tho Australians flogged our bowling right and left at the speed of some SO or 90 runs an hour. They played for safety in 1926 only after the moment they realised they could not win a three-day match, because of weak bowling. The present Australian eleven may not boast a McDonald, a Mailey, or a Gregory. But English batsmen have never yet really liked Grimmett, even on the flawless pitches of his own land. Wall may find our turf an ally, and I am told that Fairfax and 1-lurwood are more than useful bowlers on a wicket which is in the slightest sensitive. ADVANTAGE IN BOWLING England ought, though, to prove the more dangerous bowling side, if only because several of the Australian young men have jet to get used to tho swerving Ball. If Larwood, Tate, White, and Geary were good enough on Australian pitches to trouble Woodfull and his men, our attack on our own variable turf ought certainly to prevail more often than not. My own view is that if the Australians do somehow win the rubber the cause will have to bo sought inside the psychology of contemporary English batsmanship. Nothing is more likely to beat us than inability (or disinclination) on the part of some of our leading cricketers to hit the loose ball and “get on with the game.”

The test matches will fill the newspapers, but not the whole consciousness of men and women of the North of England. When the counties Lancashire nnd Yorkshire get to grips (or walk round one another) there will be no Australians in or on the minds of Old Trafford and Sheffield. “Our lads agenst •t’ world!” is the cry in these parts.