“The judge of the Brentford County Court has decided that
cricket is a legal game, so as to render the stakeholder liable
in an action for the recovery of the stakes, in a case where
one of the parties had refused to play.”
Cricket is not solely a game of skill--chance has sway enough to leave
the vanquished an _if_ and a _but_. A long innings bespeaks good play;
but “out the first ball” is no disgrace. A game, to be really a game,
really playful, should admit of chance as well as skill. It is the bane
of chess that its character is too severe--to lose its games is to lose
your character; and most painful of all, to be outwitted in a fair and
undeniable contest of long-headedness, tact, manœuvring, and common
sense--qualities in which no man likes to come off second best. Hence
the restless nights and unforgiving state of mind that often follows a
checkmate. Hence that “agony of rage and disappointment from which,”
said Sydney Smith, “the Bishop of ---- broke my head with a chess-board
fifty years ago at college.”
But did we say that ladies, famed as some have been in the hunting
field, know anything of cricket too? Not often; though I could have
mentioned two,--the wife and daughter of the late William Ward, all
three now no more, who could tell you--the daughter especially--the
forte and the failing of every player at Lord’s. I accompanied them
home one evening, to see some records of the game, to their humble
abode in Connaught Terrace, where many an ornament reminded me of the
former magnificence of the Member for the City, the Bank Director,
and the great Russia merchant; and I thought of his mansion in the
once not unfashionable Bloomsbury Square, the banqueting room of
which many a Wykehamist has cause to remember; for when famed, as
the Wykehamists were, for the quickest and best of fielding, they
had won their annual match at Lord’s (and twenty years since they
rarely lost), Mr. Ward would bear away triumphantly the winners to
end the day with him. But, talking of the ladies, to say nothing of
Miss Willes, who revived overhand bowling, their natural powers of
criticism, if honestly consulted, would, we think, tell some home
truths to a certain class of players who seem to forget that, to be a
Cricketer one must still be a man; and that a manly, graceful style
of play is worth something independently of its effect on the score.
Take the case of the Skating Club. Will they elect a man because, in
spite of arms and legs centrifugally flying, he can do some tricks of
a posture-master, however wonderful? No! elegance in simple movements
is the first thing: without elegance nothing counts. And so should
it be with cricket. I have seen men, accounted players, quite as
bad as some of the cricketers in Mr. Pips’s diary. “Pray, Lovell,”
I once heard, “have I the right guard?” “Guard indeed! Yes! keep on
looking as ugly and as awkward as you are now, and no man in England
can bowl for fright!” _Apropos_, one of the first hints in archery
is, “don’t make faces when you pull your bow.” Now we do seriously
entreat those young ladies, into whose hands this book may fall, to
profess, on our authority, that they are judges of the game as far as
appearance goes; and also that they will quiz, banter, tease, lecture,
never-leave-alone, and otherwise plague and worry all such brothers or
husbands as they shall see enacting those anatomical contortions, which
too often disgrace the game of cricket.
Cricket, we said, is a game chiefly of skill, but partly of chance.
Skill avails enough for interest, and not too much for friendly
feeling. No game is played in better humour--never lost till won--the
game’s alive till the last ball. For the most part, there is so little
to ruffle the temper, or to cause unpleasant collision, that there is
no place so free from temptation--no such happy plains or lands of
innocence--as our cricket-fields. We give bail for our good behaviour
from the moment that we enter them. Still, a cricket-field is a sphere
of wholesome discipline in obedience and good order; not to mention
that manly spirit which faces danger without shrinking, and bears
disappointment with good nature. Disappointment! and say where is there
more poignant disappointment, while it lasts, than, after all your
practice for a match, and anxious thought and resolution to avoid every
chance, and score off every possible ball, to be balked and run out,
caught at the slip, or stumped even off a shooter. “The course of true
love (even for cricket) never did run smooth.” Old Robinson, one of
the finest batsmen of his day, had six unlucky innings in succession:
once caught by Hammond, from a draw; then bowled with shooters, or
picked up at short slip: the poor fellow said he had lost all his play,
thinking “the fault is in ourselves, and not our stars;” and was with
difficulty persuaded to play one match more, in which--whose heart does
not rejoice to hear?--he made one hundred and thirty runs!
“But, as to stirring excitement,” writes a friend, “what can surpass
a hardly-contested match, when you have been manfully playing an
uphill game, and gradually the figures on the telegraph keep telling
a better and a better tale, till at last the scorers stand up and
proclaim a tie, and you win the game by a single and rather a nervous
wicket, or by five or ten runs! If in the field with a match of this
sort, and trying hard to prevent these few runs being knocked off by
the last wickets, I know of no excitement so intense for the time, or
which lasts so long afterwards. The recollection of these critical
moments will make the heart jump for years and years to come; and it
is extraordinary to see the delight with which men call up these grand
moments to memory; and to be sure how they will talk and chatter, their
eyes glistening and pulses getting quicker, as if they were again
finishing ‘that rattling good match.’ People talk of the excitement of
a good run with the Quorn or Belvoir hunt. I have now and then tumbled
in for these good things; and, as far as my own feelings go, I can
safely say that a fine run is not to be compared to a good match; and
the excitement of the keenest sportsman is nothing either in intensity
or duration to that caused by a ‘near thing’ at cricket. The next
good run takes the place of the other; whereas hard matches, like the
snow-ball, gather as they go. This is my decided opinion; and that
after watching and weighing the subject for some years. I have seen men
tremble and turn pale at a near match,
‘_Quum spes arrectæ juvenum exultantiaque haurit_
_Corda pavor pulsans_’--
while, through the field, the deepest and most awful silence reigns,
unbroken but by some nervous fieldsman humming a tune or snapping his
fingers to hide his agitation.”
“What a glorious sensation it is,” writes Miss Mitford, in ‘Our
Village,’ “to be winning, winning, winning! Who would think that a
little bit of leather and two pieces of wood had such a delightful and
delighting power?”