Page:The Crisis in Cricket and the Leg Before Rule (1928).djvu/66

58 but it was not till about 1897 that groundsmen introduced marl and other artificial means. In Wisden's Almanack of 1902, it was remarked that on wickets prepared by modern methods, it became increasingly difficult to finish matches and the captains of the first-class counties asked the M.C.C. to confirm two resolutions passed by them, one of which was that the bowling crease should be widened, the other that artificial preparation of the wicket was undesirable. The widening of the bowling creases was passed by the M.C.C, but no legislation against artificial preparation of wickets was put forward. Apparently the mere fact of the matter having been brought forward by the captains had some effect, for Wisden in the 1906 edition said that the simpler methods of preparing wickets had worked well. Now the use of marl and artificial means have returned, and though never used at Lords or, I hear, in Yorkshire, is habitually to be seen at the Oval, Bristol, Brighton and other grounds.

To describe the effect that marl and other methods of artificial preparation have on wickets, I cannot do better than quote what has been written by Strudwick in his book, Twenty-five Tears Behind the Stumps. Strudwick has played cricket in England, Australia and South Africa; he has kept wicket on every first-class ground in the three countries and nobody has so good an opportunity of knowing how balls come off the ground as a wicket-keeper, and this is what he says in Twenty-five Years Behind the Stumps: "The wickets . . . are all against the bowler—all the life is taken out of the pitch." "Unless a ball is pitched short, one rarely sees it get up stump high" (p. xix). "We hear a lot about the dearth offast bowlers, but it is the lifeless