Page:The Crisis in Cricket and the Leg Before Rule (1928).djvu/12

4 there seems to be growing a feeling that it is almost outside the bounds o f possibility to finish an England and Australia Test match in three days, so four or more days will have to be given. The Australians themselves, naturally and rightly, hate any idea of drawn matches, and when they say that it is ridiculous for them to travel thousands of miles to play drawn matches, we must agree with them. Anybody who saw the Test match in 1921 at the Oval saw what a farce three-day Test matches may possibly become. On the last day all hope of finishing the match was abandoned; Mr. Armstrong, the captain, practically retired from the game, and Russell and Brown scored hundreds whilst the regular bowlers were rested. This fiasco was probably largely the reason why it was agreed that the last Test match at the Oval in 1926 should be played to a finish, but it ran to after six o'clock on the fourth day, and would probably have run to a fifth or even sixth if heavy rain on the night of the second day had not made the wicket difficult to play on after the first two days. In Test matches it seems to be possible that three day matches are doomed, and in the years when the Australians are over here, all our arrangements will be upset.

It is not necessary to give more than a few statistics to prove that if something is not done to make drawn matches fewer in number, three day matches will perish. In the good old days very few drawn matches occurred except when caused by rain. But in 1926 one hundred and fifty-one matches were finished, and one hundred and thirty-nine were drawn, and a careful examination of the drawn matches shows that about fifty of them were due to a glut of