Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/114

Rh weather. The ignorant spectator who understands and appreciates a hard hit, but does not understand or appreciate a hanging ball being beautifully timed and returned along the ground to the bowler, might have been taught better things, but his taste has been vitiated and his baser nature pandered to by the high scoring of the day.

There is another way in which high scoring is an evil, and that is that it tends to make the cricket on the third day a burlesque. Everybody sees that the game must be drawn, so all the heart is taken out of the players, the regular bowlers are taken off—it is no good tiring them—the field are listless, and the spectators leave the ground. In several cases lately stumps have been drawn before the advertised time. The elevens have to play a match on the following day two hundred miles off perhaps, and to catch a particular train becomes important. The whole spirit of the game is broken, there is a sense of unsatisfied effort and of wasted time, and if cricket was not the great game it is, it would be killed by such a state of things. Thirdly, the bowling suffers. It is impossible to get men out by bowling a good length.