Cricket for Americans

AT the present, hour all of us who are British are anxious to cultivate cordial relations with the United States. It has occurred to me that something could be done here with cricket. Americans, I fear, do not understand our national British game, and lack sympathy with it. I remember a few years ago attending a county match in England with an American friend, and I said to him at noon on Wednesday (the match had begun on Monday), ‘I’m afraid that if it keeps on raining they’ll have to draw stumps.’ ‘Draw what?’ he said. ’Draw out the wickets,’ I answered, ‘and call the game ended.’ ‘Thank God,’ he answered. Yet this was a really big game, a county match — Notts against Hants, I think, but perhaps Bucks against Yorks. Anyway it was a tense, exciting game, Notts (or Bucks) with 600 runs leading by 350, four wickets down, and only another six hours to play.

Ever since that day I meant to try to put the game in a better light, and then people in America could understand how wonderful it is.

Perhaps I should explain that, all modesty apart, when I speak of cricket I speak of what I know. I played cricket for years and years. I still have a bat. Once I played in an All-Canada match at Ottawa before the Governor-General. I went in first in the first innings, and was bowled out by the first ball; but. in the second innings I went in last, and by ‘playing back’ quickly on the first ball I knocked down the wickets before the ball could reach them. Lord Minto told me afterwards that he had never seen batting like mine before, except perhaps in India, where the natives are notoriously quick.

Let me begin with a few simple explanations. Cricket is played with eleven on a side, provided you can get eleven. It isn’t always easy to get a cricket, team and sometimes you have to be content with ten or nine or even less. This difficulty of getting men for a side really arises from the fact that cricketers are not paid to play. They wouldn’t take it, or rather they do take it when they can get it, but then they ar professionals. This makes a distinction in English cricket as between players and gentlemen, although, as a matter of fact, a great many gentlemen are first-class players, and nowadays, at any rate, a good many of the players are gentlemen, and, contrawise, quite a number of the gentlemen are not quite what you would call gentlemen. I’m afraid I haven’t brought out the distinction very clearly. Perhaps I may add that when we play cricket in Canada there is no question of gentlemen.

So, as I say, although cricket is properly played with eleven on a side, it is often difficult to get enough. You have to be content with what you can bring, and pick up one or two others when you get there. When I played in the AllCanada game at Ottawa, we had nine at the start, but we got one more in the hotel and one in the barbershop. When the All-England team goes to Australia they easily get eleven men, because that is different. That’s twelve thousand miles. But when it’s only from one town to the next it’s hard to get more than seven or eight.

But let me explain the game. Cricket is played by bowling a ball up and down a ‘pitch’ of 22 yards (roughly 66 feet, approximately) at each end of which are set three upright sticks called wickets. A batsman stands just in front of each set of wickets, a little at the side, and with his bat stops the ball from hitting the wickets. If the ball hits the wickets he is out, but otherwise not. Thus if he begins on Monday and his wickets are not hit on Monday he begins again on Tuesday; and so on; play stops all Sunday.

Of course, when you are looking on at a cricket match, you are not supposed to shout and yell the way we do over baseball on our side of the water in Canada and in the States. All you do is to say every now and then, ‘Oh, very pretty, sir, very pretty!’ You are speaking to the batsman, who is about two hundred yards away and can’t hear you. But that doesn’t matter; you keep right on: ‘Oh, well done, sir, well done.’ . . . That day of the county match in England that I spoke of, my American friend heard an Englishman on the other side of him say, ‘Oh, very pretty! Very pretty, sir,’ and he asked the Englishman what was very pretty. But of course the Englishman had no way of telling him. He didn’t know him. So my friend turned to me and asked, ‘What did he do?’ And I explained that it wasn’t what he did, it was what he didn’t do.

A great many things in good cricket turn on that — what you don’t do. You let the ball go past you, for instance, instead of hitting it, and the experts say, ‘Oh, well let alone, sir.’ There are lots more balls coming; you’ve three days to wait for one. In the game of which I speak, the really superb piece of play was this: the bowler sent a fast ball through the air right straight towards the batsman’s face; he moved his face aside and let it pass, and they called, ‘Well let alone, sir.’ You see, if it had hit him on the side of his face, he’d have been out. How out? Why, by what is called L. B. W. I forget what the letters exactly stand for, but. we use them just as in the States you use things like P. W. A., A. A. C., and S. S. E. and R. I. P. You know what they are about, though you can’t remember what they stand for. Well, L. B. W. is a way of getting out in cricket. It means that if you stand in front of the ball and it hits you, — not your bat, but you, — you are out. Suppose, for instance, you deliberately turn your back on the ball and it rises up and hits you right behind in the middle of your body — out! L. B. W.

There was a terrible row over this a few years ago in connection with one of the great Test Matches between England and Australia. These, of course, are the great events, the big things every year in the cricket world. An All-England team goes out once a year to play Test Matches in Australia, and an AllAustralian team comes to England once a year for Test Matches. As soon as they know which is really best, they can have a real match. Meantime they keep testing it out. Well, a few years ago the Australians started the idea of bowling the ball terribly fast, and right straight at the batsman, not at the wickets, so as to hit. him on purpose. Even if he started to run away from the wickets they’d get him, even if he was halfway to the home tent. I didn’t see it myself, but I understand that was the idea of it. So there was a tremendous row about, it, and bad feeling, with talk of Australia leaving the British Empire. However, outsiders intervened and it was suggested (the Archbishop of Canterbury, I think) that the rule should be that if the bowler meant to hit the man to put him out, then he wasn’t out, but that if he didn’t mean to hit and he hit him, then he was out. Naturally the bowler had to be put on his honor whether he meant it. But that didn’t bother the Australians; they were willing to go on their honor. They’re used to it. Tn fact the English agreed, too, that when they got the ball in their turn they’d go on their honor in throwing it at an Australian.

That, of course, is the nice thing about cricket — the spirit of it, the sense of honor. When we talk of cricket we always say that such a thing ‘isn’t cricket,’ meaning that it’s not a thing you would do. You could, of course. There’d be nothing to stop you, except that, you see, you couldn’t. At a cricket game, for example, you never steal any of the other fellows’ things out of the marquee tent where you come and go. You ask why not Well, simply that it ‘isn’t cricket.’ Or take an example in the field and you’ll understand it better. We’ll say that you’re fielding at ‘square leg.’ That means that you are fielding straight behind the batter’s back and only about twenty-five feet away from him. Well, suppose you happen to be daydreaming a little, — cricket is a dreamy game, — and the batter happens to swing round hard on a passing ball and pastes it right into the middle of your stomach. As soon as you are able to speak you are supposed to call to the bowler, ‘Awfully sorry, old man’: not sorry you got hit in the stomach, sorry you missed the chance he gave you; because from the bowler’s point of view you had a great opportunity, when you got hit in the stomach, of holding the ball against your stomach — which puts the batter out.

So you see when you play cricket there comes in all the time this delicate idea of the cricket spirit. A good deal of English government is carried on this way. You remember a few years ago that very popular Prime Minister who used to come to the House — that means the House of Commons — and say, ‘I’m afraid, gentlemen, I’ve made another mess again with this business of Italy and Ethiopia; damned if I can keep track of them; that’s the third mess I’ve made this year.’ And the House wouldn’t vote him out of office. It wouldn’t have been cricket. Instead, they went wild with applause because the Prime Minister had shown the true cricket spirit by acknowledging that he was beaten, though of course he didn’t know when he had been licked. And, for the matter of that, he’d come all the way down from Scotland just for the purpose at the very height of the grouse season, — or the fly season, — anyway, one of those insect seasons that keep starting in Scotland when the heather is bright with the gillies all out full.

That’s the way we run a government — cricket. We don’t need any constitution. And that is the great secret of how the British Empire has been spread out all over tropical countries. Other nations go out and say to the natives, ‘You see this gun!’ But the English say, ‘Now, you see this piece of coconut matting? Well, you help me to peg it down, and this is a cricket bat, and I’ll teach you how to play cricket.’ And next thing you read is that Ram Jam is playing for All-England, and that his tribe are sending a contingent to look for the next war. . . .

Looking back over what I have written above, I am afraid I may have given a wrong impression here and there. When I implied that the two batsmen stand at the wicket and stop the ball, I forgot to say that every now and then they get impatient, or indignant, and not only stop it but hit it. And do they hit it! A cricket ball is half as heavy again as a baseball and travels farther. I’ve seen Don Bradman, the Australian, playing on our McGill University stadium, hit the ball so hard that it traveled right out over the top benches of the stadium and then over the tops of the trees on the side of Mount Royal, and from there on. They had to stop the game and drink shandygaff while they sent a boy to get the ball. They almost t hought of getting a new one.

And when I talked of hitting a cricketer in the stomach with the ball I forgot to explain how awfully difficult it is to do it. Not that they’ve no stomach, — no, indeed, plenty! — you don’t train down for cricket, you fill up. But the point is that the cricketer will catch any kind of ball before you can hit him. And can they catch! You’ll sec a fellow playing cover-point, — that’s northeast half a point east from the bat, distance 20 yards, — and a ball is driven hard and fast above his head, and he’ll leap in the air with one hand up, and, while still in the air, leap up a little farther still, and smack! goes the ball into his one hand. Can you wonder that the spectators all murmur, ‘Oh, very pretty, sir’?

And in point of excitement you think cricket slow, but can’t you see how the excitement slowly gathers and all piles up at the end? Two totals coming closer and closer together — fifty to tie, fiftyone to win, twenty to tie, twenty-one to win — then three to tie, four to win — one smashing hit will do it now! Ah, there she goes! — high above the pavilion, a boundary hit for four! ‘Oh, very nice, sir, very nice!’

Oh, yes, cricket’s all right. Let’s have a shandygaff.