Page:The Crisis in Cricket and the Leg Before Rule (1928).djvu/38

30 In the same article Mr. Knight describes how he himself was clean bowled by Kennedy in a Surrey and Hants match. He was bowled "neck and crop by a big of break. ... I played back to it, but my bat was hung out far from my body, and so my right leg was not guarding the stumps." Mr. Knight then quotes what he calls "words of wisdom" from Tom Hayward, spoken to him in the Pavilion afterwards. "Oh, sir, why didn't you get your legs there in case the ball beat the bat." Mr. Pardon at the end of the above-quoted article wrote: "Nothing read for twenty years impressed me more than Hayward's frank admission that his legs had saved his wicket hundreds of times." Where Hayward made this admission is immaterial; Mr. Pardon read it somewhere. Hayward in his first-class cricket career made 43,409 runs, and who can tell how many of these thousands were due to his saving his wicket hundreds of times with his legs? Every week innumerable cases occur of saving the wicket with the legs, and thousands of runs are the result, and worst of all larger and larger grows the number of drawn matches, and if this is not stopped the debacle will come. Mr. Knight, in the Pall Mall, seems to think that this leg-play is all correct because Shrewsbury did it: "It is repeatedly employed by the peerless Jack Hobbs," and he might have added many more. It is the only blot on the Shrewsbury escutcheon, and peerless as Hobbs is he would have been more peerless still if he had not saved his wicket so often with his legs. I myself saw Hobbs last year deliberately follow Mr. Knight's advice, for he put his bat out of action and stopped a ball of Kennedy's with his knee.