CRICKET.

Waipawa Mail, Volume I, Issue 23, 30 November 1878, Page 2

CRICKET.

(Saturday Review.) People who make the annual cricketing pilgrimage to Canterbury a modern “Pilgrimage of Grace” were disappointed this y r ear. Mr W. G. Grace did not come up to the very mildest expectations. In tho match between Kent and England ho was by no means “ at home ;” in the affair between M.C.C. and Keftt he was never away from home during the innings of his side, if a cricketer’s domicile is the pavilion. His two innings produced precisely one run, and Hearn and Mr Penn enjoyed the pleasure of bowling him clean. The time was when a bowler thus favored would have piously treasured one of the balls in a glass case, and bequeathed it to posterity as an invaluable heirloom. It used to be impossible, or next to impossible, - for any one but that useful field, Umpire, to get Mr Grace’s wicket. When Umpire was tired to death, when he would have liked to sit and givo judgment in a chair (after the manner of the Fine Old English Cricketer in the song), when liis life was imperilled in the neighbourhood of short leg, then, somehow, Mr Grace occasionally got out. Umpire braced himself for an effort, and declared that the invincible one was either caught at the wicket or “leg before.” Then would Mr Grace cast an appealing and indignant look to heaven, like on© who expects some such portent as lightning in a clear sky, and would march, among thunders of applause, to the pavilion. What has caused all “ the 1' change,” and how comes it that c. ~ry puny whipster (not that Mr A. Penn and Hearn are “ whipsters”) gets his wicket ? Only a few times this year, and chiefly when he was playing Shaw and Morley, and all the might of Notts, has Mr Grace been himself. It looks as if Mr Spofforth had shaken his nerve early in the season. However, it happens, the reduction of Mr Grace to the ordinary level of good batsmen, to the class of Lockwood, Mr Ridley, Mr Webbe, and the rest, has made cricket a much more even gam®.