TIMELESS CRICKET TESTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 April 1939, Page 9

TIMELESS CRICKET TESTS

DECISIVE FACTOR ELIMINATED. Victory and defeat are of little consequence as compared with the lessons that are writ large over the monstrous score-board of the fifth test match, England versus South Africa, says “The Times.” The most important of them is that a match without the discipline imposed by time —time which carries with it its own problems of strategy and tactics —is null and void of all the elements which go to make cricket the enchanting game it naturally is. Time must be a decisive factor; but it must be time definied in terms of playing hours and not of an arbitrary number of days at the mercy of whatever the weather may decide to do. A suggestion that hours should be limited has been proposed by the South African Cricket Board of Control, and it is very much to be hoped that it will be adopted. The objection that limited hours may mean the drawing of a certain number of matches loses its weight when it is put in the scales against the abysmal prospectl of further games played after the manner of the atrocity at Durban. Besides, drawn game can be very far from being a negative game; and a last-wicket stand, which has no hope of winning the match, but an outside one of saving it, is as well worth watching as the hitting of many sixes and the accumulation of hundreds of runs. A defensive stroke against a quickly turning ball is a satisfactorysight even though the scoreboard disdains to take the slightest notice of .it, and the more that bloated Durban score is studied the more sinister does the perfection of the pitch appear.