Page:The Crisis in Cricket and the Leg Before Rule (1928).djvu/41

Rh such balls do not get wickets, no other result but huge unhealthy scoring and drawn matches are possible.

As Mr. Pardon said, a wicket is eight inches broad and a bat four and a half inches wide, and if batsmen follow the advice given not only by Mr. Knight in the Badminton, but by others, and bring the legs together in front of the wicket and behind the bat to act as an extra defence to balls pitched outside the wicket, it is difficult to understand how batsmen can be bowled out at all on modern wickets by balls pitched outside the bowler's territory. And if they leave balls alone in the future as much as they do now catches must take a long time in coming. I asked Mr. Howell, the celebrated Australian bowler, more than twenty years ago, how batsmen could be got out on Australian wickets, and he replied that they never would be got out were it not for the fact that sometimes they got themselves out. This state of things is coming to pass here in England, where indeed it is already difficult enough to finish matches in three fine days.

It must be admitted that there is a great difference in the general feeling about l.b.w. between batsmen of these days and those of former times. It is a delicate subject to write about and I hasten to say at the start that I do not consider that modern batsmen are necessarily bad sportsmen because they use the legs to guard the wicket. Times are changed and there is a different atmosphere now as compared with that of forty and fifty years ago. Batsmen in old times somehow felt a little ashamed when given out l.b.w. because it never occurred to anybody to consider the legs as a proper means of defending the wicket, and their consciences pricked