Macdonell’s Cricket Match

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 60, 16 August 1940, Page 6

Macdonell’s Cricket Match

N A. G. Macdonell’s cricket match (in "England, Their England’’) there are various human oddities and peculiarities in the landscape and a string of funny incidents. The village fast bowler is the local blacksmith, and the ground at the end from which he bowls slopes away, so that the bowler has to

run up hill to deliver the ball, and it is only during the last three or four yards of his run that he is visible to the batsman, The visiting team includes a Professor of Ballistics. When at the very end of the game a high catch comes to him, he makes a lightning calculation of angles, velocities, density of the air, barometer readings and tem-

peratures. On the visiting side there is also an American who has never played cricket before, and when he manages to hit the first ball that he receives, he throws down his bat and runs fast in the direction of cover point. " Well, well,’ he says, "I thought I was playing base-ball." Now, the curious thing is that much of what seems to be a farcical account can be paralleled in real cricket. The writer of this sketch has been told by a New Zealand Rhodes Scholar that he played on a village ground near Oxford where the field did slope away from one and exactly as Mr. Macdonell describes, and the fast bowler did come running up the slope to deliver the ball. Moreover, one of the college sides that this New Zealander played in included a Canadian student who behaved exactly as this American did in " England, Their England." He hit the first ball, dropped his bat and bolted towards cover point. Apparently anything is possible in English cricket (From a sketch of Mr. A, G. Macdonell broadcast by the NBS.)