at all successfully against the Players. It may safely be said that, with two or three exceptions, the great amateur bowlers of the last 50 years have belonged to either Cambridge or Oxford, and, quoting from memory, I cannot remember a year in which the Gentlemen had not two or more players in their eleven from one or the other. And, speaking from my twenty-five years' experience of first-class cricket, I fail to see that it is likely to be otherwise in the future.
I know that good bowlers and batsmen are made long before the age at which public school boys usually go to Oxford or Cambridge, and that Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and one or two others ought to have the credit of having trained the eminent University players who have stirred the cricket world. Still there can be very little doubt that it is the hard discipline which comes after 17 or 18 years of age that develops the promising boy into a first-class player.
Cambridge has the credit of having produced more first-class bowlers than Oxford, and the names of the most prominent will come readily to the mind of every cricketer Messrs. A. G. Steel and C. T. Studd in the past, and S. M. J. Woods and E. C. Streatfeild of today. Of course, if we go back farther, such great names as M. Kempson, C. D. Marsham, E. L. Fellowes, W. F. Maitland, R. Lang, H. M. Plowden, Hon. F. G. Pelham, W. N. Powys, D. Buchanan, S. E. Butler (who took all 10 wickets of Cambridge for 38 runs, in 1871), and others will be remembered. A still larger number might be mentioned; but those I have given are sufficient to prove what I have said that the great amateur bowlers have mostly come from Oxford or Cambridge.
And the same may be said of our crack batsmen, though in a lesser degree. Such great names as J. Makinson, C. G. Lane, Hon. C. G. Lyttelton, R. A. H.
