Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/34

Rh cannot even play. At golf you do indeed play, but you cannot interfere with the enemy. Each of these two games is self-centred; learn how to play certain strokes well, and when you win matches it is because your rival cannot make them so well as you. Of course, there is a large amount of luck in both games, billiards especially, but over a series of matches there is little to choose in this respect, and there is luck at every game except chess and that class of contest.

But though you ought not to heed your opponent, but simply play your game and if possible ignore him altogether, still to do this is a counsel of perfection, for the skill of your rival exercises a most important effect upon the play of practically everybody. I have mentioned billiards so much that I may be accused of wandering from the subject of cricket and golf, but there is in some ways so much in common between golf and billiards that I think I may be pardoned. A few years back, and even now, you could see players of the calibre of Mitchell, Peall, Dawson, and Diggle play among each other, and so well did they play that a simple man would infer from the length of their breaks and general