Page:The Crisis in Cricket and the Leg Before Rule (1928).djvu/59

Rh that it is a mere coincidence that ineffective bowling prevails, if not all over the world, at any rate in England, Australia and South Africa, and this has never happened before. It would be more true to say that bowlers are not worse than they were, but they are not so efficient, simply because they are unduly handicapped by the too easy wickets and by leg play. No doubt bowlers send down many more bad balls than A. Shaw, Peate and the great Australian bowlers, but that is because of the monkey tricks played by googly bowlers, which get wickets, but at a very heavy cost. Good-length bowlers who could make the ball turn with a little help from the wicket, are not now efficient because no such help is obtained. Strudwick's remarks about modern wickets, which will be referred to later, are conclusive and give us the reasons. My own opinion is that it is wonderful they bowl so well considering that besides all these reasons, all bowlers, especially fast bowlers, are overworked.

The one point which I fully admit does present some difficulty in considering the advisability of changing the l.b.w. rule, is that batsmen will find themselves up against a cunningly placed field with a crowd of short legs and bowlers like Root, who keeps a dead length outside the leg stump, with the ball coming in frequently from leg. I may say that I think modern players when meeting slow bowlers of this type would play them better if they did not play so fast footed; most of them never saw batsmen like J. W. Dale, S. H. Akroyd, W. L. Murdoch and A. G. Steel, who used to run out and smother certain balls at the pitch. Steel often played Spofforth's slower ball in this way, and