Page:Cricket (Lyttelton, 1898).djvu/82

78 owing to the fact that as time is unlimited for the big Australian matches, which are played to a finish, each man can play his own game. Such a game certainly pays in an English season like 1896, when the hot weather gave a series of hard wickets. On such wickets, especially if you happen to win the toss, a batting eleven like the Australian eleven of that year is very hard to beat.

As may be seen, on looking back over the twenty years since the first Australian eleven came to England, the great Colonial bowlers have had their happy days in England, where the weather is more variable in the long-run, rather than in their own country. Spofforth would not have attained the enviable position of the greatest bowler in the world on his bowling in Australia alone, where it is said that Turner and Palmer were thought as good. It was on English wickets that he earned undying fame. In his early cricket days the Australian batting was nothing like what it has since become; but against Englishmen in their own country nobody has ever