Page:The Cricket Field (1854).djvu/176

152 The most difficult of all bailers are those which ought not to be allowed to come in as bailers at all, those which should be met at the pitch. Such over-pitched balls give neither time nor space, if you attempt to play them back.

Every length ball is difficult to play back, just in proportion to the ease with which it could be covered forward. A certain space, from nine to twelve feet, before the crease is, to a practised batsman, so much terra firma, whereon pitching every ball is a safe stop or score. Practise with the chalk mark, and learn to make this terra firma as wide as possible.

The is so called, I suppose, because, when perfectly made, there is no draw at all. Look at fig. 2. The bat is not drawn across the wicket, but hangs perpendicularly from the wrists; though the wrists of a good player are never idle, but bring the bat to meet the ball a few inches, and the hit is the natural angle formed by the opposing forces. "Say also," suggests Clarke, "that the ball meeting the bat, held easy in the hand, will turn it a little of its own force, and the wrists feel when to help it." This old rule hardly consists with the principle of meeting, the ball.

The Draw is the spontaneous result of straight play about the two leg stumps: for if you begin, as in fig. 1., with point of bat thrown back true to middle stump, you cannot bring the bat