Page:The Crisis in Cricket and the Leg Before Rule (1928).djvu/31

Rh should be asked how many bowlers of Richardson's pace, skill, length of run and stamina have been known in the history of cricket. Richardson bowled in eight years nearly fifty-nine thousand balls for sixteen hundred and ninety-six wickets for an average of eighteen runs a wicket, a vast majority of which were bowled on the Oval, perhaps the easiest ground in England. The answer should be that nobody has ever done such a magnificent feat in the history of the game or ever will again under present conditions, and according to Strudwick, as will be seen later, Richardson on modern wickets would have been almost an ordinary bowler.

To show how completely the preponderance of the bat prevails, it is both interesting and sad to refer to Wisden's Almanack for 1928. Beginning on page 173 and going on to the middle of page 197, there is a wearisome list of batting records. "Great individual scores from 288 to 429." "Two separate hundreds in one match." "Long partnerships," and many others of a like nature. And after twenty-four pages of this we come to the bowlers—poor devils. They have to be content with less than five pages to commemorate their records, a hideous state of things indeed, and all the more so because of the batting feats the vast majority took place since 1900, only two finding a place before 1870, while to get bowling feats the editor has to go back as far as 1845, when wickets were not so easy and batsmen did not use the legs to save their wicket.

A point to be remembered which is important is that coaching is mainly responsible for the great preponderance in the number of batsmen as compared with bowlers. I am not talking of batsmen and bowlers who are so