Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/127

100 and Players, many of Grace's, Shrewsbury's, Jackson's, Ranjitsinghi's, and others, it would astonish you to see how few balls hit these batsmen on the leg at all. Bowling is played as it should be: the ball is met by the bat, not by the leg, and this notwithstanding the pitch of the ball.

Mr. Steel is one of the highest authorities of the game: both as a player and as a judge of the game he can speak with a weight which commands the respect of everybody. Mr. Shuter is another player who as a batsman and captain has had a long experience, and it is therefore with a chastened feeling that I attempt to explain why I feel myself bound to differ from both these gentlemen on the important question of l.b.w. Mr. Steel bases his objection to a change in the law on the case of a slow leg-break bowler. Such bowlers, he says, would bowl good length balls with nearly every field on the leg side, and in his opinion the very best batsman would in a short time stop with his legs a ball which would have hit the wicket. It is assumed that Mr. Steel means round-arm bowlers only by the term slow leg-break bowlers, not lob bowlers, and we would ask how many slow leg-break bowlers