Page:Cricket (Steel, Lyttelton).djvu/160

138 one of the expectant short-legs or else be bowled oflf his bat or legs. The author recollects on one occasioji having to play against the redoubtable Spofforth under the above circumstances. After receiving a few balls he came to the conclusion that it was absolutely impossible to prevent being captured by one of the short-legs, who were both standing ridiculously close, and every ball was rising uncomfortably high. He determined to take the liberty of pulling, and did so once or twice with success, till he paid the usual penalty of the practice on a kicking wicket by being badly cut over. He then tried jumping in front of his wicket and trying to slide the breaking balls off his bat to very fine long-leg. Spofforth, however, was too much for him, and almost immediately bowled a straight middle stump ball without any break on it and rather faster than the others; it kept low, hit the shin, and there was as dead a case of 'l.b.w.' as any bowler could wish for.

A favourite trick of some slow bowlers is to bowl from different distances. Sometimes the bowler will have one leg behind the wickets and the other in front, and sometimes both behind; we have even seen some bowl occasionally with the front leg as much as two yards behind the wicket. The object of this is to deceive the batsman as to the pitch of the ball by changing the distance the ball has to travel. This is doubtless an excellent theory, but in our opinion it is not of much worth in actual practice. We have seen bowlers of all sorts repeatedly try this experiment, but in our experience it never meets with any appreciable success. This is perhaps owing to the fact that the batsman can always see very clearly when the bowler does not come up the whole way to the wicket, and is accordingly on the alert for a shorter pitched ball than usual. The only practiser of this trick who ever seems to turn it to good account is Tom Emmett, the left-handed Yorkshire veteran; he usually bowls his slow wides from some distance behind the crease, and certainly obtains a fair share of wickets with these balls; but even in his case we think that it is generally not so much the difference in the distance that