Out-door Games: Cricket and Golf/Chapter 13
ALFRED MYNN ESQ
CHAPTER XIII
Heroes
We are all conscious of having in our hearts some soft spot for a real hero, and at cricket each man has his hero. If he happens to be a bat, who does not know the sensation that runs through our frame when he is seen walking to the wicket? It may be a difficult bowler's wicket, yet somehow we have trust and confidence in him, for the first essential of our hero must be that he succeeds where others fail. In these days everybody gets runs except when there is a soft wicket and a sun caking it on the top; then there are few indeed who can show even moderate batting except our hero. He is not a random slogger, though such men have their real uses especially on difficult wickets: our real hero always plays the game, but he has an eye of a hawk and a brain of a general, a brain which can adapt itself to things as they come, be they rough or smooth. If the wicket pops and hangs, he has got the power of self-restraint; the bat will be in the right place, but held limply and with the left shoulder well up and forward, and his eye will never be off the ball from the second it leaves the bowler's hand; he has observed its hang, its turn, and its pace, and finally he has mastered it; he has either stopped it or else used his wrists at the right second, and, without hesitation, hit it hard. There is no playing at the ball, as so many do in these days, entirely in the hope that the ball will take a certain line and pace; there is no expectation or hope in the mind of our hero; he takes nothing for granted; he knows the wicket is difficult, and he trusts nothing except his own eye, but the eye of a real hero does not fail him in the moment of danger and difficulty. If the difference between a hero and the common herd may be defined, it is that one possesses real genius and the rest do not. When, however, we are asked to define genius, all we have to say is that to do so is impossible; but, for our present purpose, it is sufficient to say that a batting genius is a man who can adapt his play to circumstances and has the power of watching the ball. If the wicket is fast and easy, the man of genius can play forward and hit all round the ground, but his style is not stereotyped; if the wicket is slow and the ball inclined to hang, he can play back and place the ball for singles, and pull a short ball to leg for four. He will know when to leave his ground and drive a medium pace ball from the pitch; in short, he will prove himself to be a man of infinite resource, who will throw the dogmas of correct play and treatises to the winds, and obey no rule but simply his own genius.
I am tempted to make these remarks in this year of grace 1900, after about seven weeks of the cricket season have gone. During this time cricketers have seen the Haywards, the Abels, and several more score their hundreds when the wickets have been easy and fast and true, but there have been also difficult wickets, and if the truth be told, in the hearts of many of us there is a wish that we may live to see a year in which there will be enough rain mixed with sunshine, to make the wickets unlike what they have been for the last ten years.
I would ask any fair-minded, impartial observer of the game whether he has seen more than two or three real scientific exhibitions of batting played on wickets favouring the bowlers.
I saw a few weeks ago a match played between the counties of Surrey and Essex, where the wicket was difficult, but where the bowling on both sides was not—with the exception of Mead's for Essex and Lockwood's for Surrey—of a sort that could not indeed have been played by really good batsmen. Yet in the whole match there were only two innings of over fifty played, and it cannot be said that one of those, viz. Abel's, was of a very high class. Of Abel's innings it may be said that it did show one very remarkable capacity, and this capacity Abel shares with another great Surrey batsman of a past generation, viz. Jupp.
Abel, like Jupp, has the being able to run half-way to short-leg and yet hit the ball with a very crooked bat. In the particular match I am referring to, Abel did this to perfection, but how he can do it, I confess is a mystery to me. Whenever Kortright bowled on the leg-stump or even the middle and leg-stumps, Abel might have been seen drawing his right foot away from the wicket and yet stopping the ball. Perrin, on the other hand, for Essex, in an innings of over ninety, played sound, scholar-like cricket, both timing the ball and hitting the loose ones in a manner which showed him to be a real cricketer. Hayward, on fast, true wickets, perhaps the best bat in England, showed himself to be a perfect child when playing Mead on a difficult, soft wicket. There was nobody in fact in the whole match, except Perrin, whom a stranger who understood the game would have described as a first-rate bat. There was another match played between Essex and Yorkshire on a soft, difficult wicket, where the same phenomenon might have been observed; in this match it was the oldest player on either side who showed to an experienced looker-on what real scientific batsmen can do. A. P. Lucas, in each innings, played absolutely perfect cricket; he scored runs and was not out in his second innings, and I have no hesitation in saying there was more sound scientific play displayed by Lucas in this match than in any innings of 200 runs that has ever been played on the modern true fast wickets.
Our real heroes in cricket, as far as batting is concerned, are those few players who can show sound cricket on difficult wickets, and it is impossible to deny the fact that the number of such players is very few. Grace, Shrewsbury, Lucas, A. G. Steel, and Webbe—all these could be trusted not to score on every occasion, but to show good cricket more often than the general run of players, many of whom scored their hundreds on easy wickets. But in these days, independently of hitters like Jessop, there is hardly one batsman, except perhaps Jackson, who is as good on difficult wickets as Shrewsbury and Lucas, both of whom are over forty years of age.
The bowling hero is an even rarer article than the batting hero. There are natural bowlers who on any wicket may be relied upon to keep a good length; and on soft difficult wickets, they are certain to meet with success, but they are, as a rule, lacking in variety; and though on easy wickets they keep runs down and on difficult wickets get most batsmen out, they are always apt to be demoralised by the modern fierce hitter, of whom Jessop is the present conspicuous example. It is not easy to explain the fact, but such hitters seem to prefer the rather fast good-length bowler like Hearne to bowlers who pitch the ball fairly well up but with some break, and can deliver the high-in-the-air dropping ball, but never far enough up for a quick-footed hitter to hit them full pitch.
In the University match of 1899 Jessop scored 42 runs in about twenty minutes, but the Oxford captain with excellent judgment kept on Knox at the Nursery End, who was just such a bowler as I have described. Jessop made fun of all the other bowlers, but though he hit Knox several times to the ropes, he was obliged to hit at the pitch of the ball which had some turn on it, and sooner or later it looked obvious that he would be caught; and he eventually was. To a batsman like Shrewsbury, who plays on really scientific principles, such a bowler as Knox would present no difficulty whatever, but it is a curious fact that such bowlers are more generally successful in getting out what our forefathers would have called reckless sloggers than Hearne or Mead would be.
The real bowling heroes are those like Spofforth and Lohmann, who could quickly realise the situation, and adapt their methods to various styles of batsmen. They are not bound to any particular length or pace, but seem to have an instinct which tells them which is the particular ball most distasteful to the batsmen to whom they happen to be bowling; and though they may have their off days, they somehow never seem to get demoralised, and even if the big hitter does bring off some strokes for four he never appears comfortable. Bowlers of this class are Spofforth, Lohmann, and Trumble, but England has not had so many as she ought, and Englishmen seem to be slow to learn the lesson that the great Australian has taught.
The last cricket hero that will be discussed is the fierce hitter, and he is a development that mainly belongs to the present day. As long ago as 1880 the Australians brought over Bonner and McDonnell, and to the Australians again we owe the lesson that one or two hitters are essential for a really first-class eleven. The real founder of the fierce-hitting school, however, was C. J. Thornton, who flourished from 1870 to 1880, and except perhaps Bonner no harder hitter has ever lived. Thornton, Bonner, McDonnell, Lyons, Hewitt, V. T. Hill, O'Brien, A. E. Trott, F. G. J. Ford, and Jessop—these are the names of perhaps the ten greatest hitters, but they are not by any means alike. Bonner, for instance, was a very hard hitter anywhere, including, what is rare in hitters pure and simple, the cut. Thornton, on the other hand, was famous for his big drives, the hardest of which were nearly straight over the bowler's head, and in this particular hit I do not think anybody has ever been quite so hard a hitter. Another characteristic of Thornton was that his biggest hits were made when he jumped out to meet the ball. Bonner, McDonnell, and Lyons, the three Australian hitters, used to hit fast-footed, as also does F. G. J. Ford. But for rapidity of run-getting and ability to hit balls of nearly every conceivable length, I regard Jessop as unequalled. There have been several wonderful Australian feats of hitting, notably one by Bonner at Scarborough in 1884, Lyons against M.C.C. in 1893, and greatest of all McDonnell against a picked eleven of the North on a mud wicket in 1888, when he scored 82 out of 86, but on each of these occasions Bannerman was batting the other end; he was always a slow player, and when in with hitters hardly tried to score. But I can remember an innings of Jessop in Gentlemen and Players when F. G. J. Ford was in the other end, and it is hardly too much to say that contrasting the two hitters, Jessop made Ford look comparatively a slow player. The reason why such hitters may be classed among the heroes of cricket is because not only is it necessary to have a wonderful eye to be able to hit like this, but the match is never safe for the opposite side till the hitter is out. No captain appears willing to run the risk of declaring the innings at an end till to make the runs or to get the side out is practically an impossibility. The hitter strikes a terror that carries a tremendous moral effect with it. In a few minutes after he has gone in both bowlers and field may have become completely demoralised, and the captain have lost his head. Lastly—and this is perhaps the most important point of all—the big hitter has the power of knocking up 30 or 40 runs on a real difficult bowler's wicket, and such an innings often means bringing about a victory for his side. Sound batsmen like Shrewsbury and A. P. Lucas play splendid and scientific cricket on such a wicket, but they cannot score fast, and often have to carry out their bat because there is nobody to stop in with them; but the big hitter stays there only twenty minutes, and in that time scores 35 runs out of a total of 70, and it is for this reason big hitters are entitled to be numbered among the heroes of the game.
It is not so easy to define the heroes of golf, but in a general way there are certain well-defined characteristics about them. At cricket the real batting genius shows that he understands how to rise superior to difficulties. It is the same with the golfing genius. He has a way of rising to the occasion. He may find his ball anywhere except right under a wall or a railing, and in any of these circumstances you never can be sure that he will not, despite his position, bring off a fine stroke. It may be necessary for him to stuff in a few more yards carry to enable a dangerous bunker or hazard to be "carried." Our golf hero nevertheless brings off the stroke: his adversary is tempted to try and do the same, and the result is disaster. He is not affected by a strong cross wind, and cheerfully takes his brassey and hits a long ball out of a cuppy lie. He may have a ten yards' putt to win or halve a hole; he takes time and care and the ball goes down; and lastly, as has been pointed out before, the golfing hero produces more or less of a paralysis in his opponents. It is the same at all games; the field are nervous when the batting hero is in, and he is more often missed than the ordinary batsman. In golf the genius is always tempting his mediocre rival to imitate him. If the genius drives a long ball, his rival presses to do the same and tops the ball into a bunker; and it is the same with a brassey shot through the green.
It is this nervousness, which all golfers seem to possess when playing against the Vardon and Taylor of the day, that really decides the issue. The golf hero may even be a little "off" his game, but somehow in a match the opponent cannot take advantage of this. He is conscious of the feeling of the future that is always in him. The hero may have driven off the line: it does not matter; he has a faculty of recovery, his second shot will be an especially great one, and the fault of the drive will be redeemed. Some years ago Mr. J. E. Laidlay shared with Messrs. Ball, Tait, Hutchinson, and Hilton the leading position among amateurs; and if my memory serves me right, he won both spring and autumn medals at St. Andrews. On one of these occasions he was frequently off the line with his drive, but he went round in under 80, and to anybody except the golf hero to be off the line from the tee would mean to be nowhere. The great players have an extraordinary power of getting out of a difficulty: the very sight of one seems to put new vigour into their whole system; and if any definition of a golfing hero be possible, it would seem to be that to them, and to them only, is given the power of getting out of difficulties and the power to do the something extra, the few yards' extra carry, and the laying a ball nearly dead with the iron club.
The golf hero has one great advantage over the cricketer hero—he has only to think of himself and his game: the cricketer has to bear the burden of ten colleagues, some of whom may contribute little to the strength of the side. If the great man happens to be a bowler, his most superhuman efforts may be baffled by a field that will not hold catches. The great golfer has only himself to think of, except in a foursome, and in a foursome it is comparatively easy for even a duffer of a partner, if only he is conscious of his own impotence, to do little to handicap his great colleague. Though, as has been said, the great man has a wonderful power of getting out of difficulties, he ought never to find himself in one, for the bad player ought to make it his chief object to avoid bunkers and hazards. If the bad player can succeed in this, the hero will win the match for him.