Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/30

win is the right number, the number that seems likely to ensure the inside winning by one wicket, or the outside by twelve runs, unless there is a collapse or pounding of the bowling by the earlier batsmen—such an innings is according to the best judgment the finest spectacle to watch that any game can afford. We all know the look of such an innings, how the hopes and fears alternately rise and fall; how, when you really begin to feel happy, the side whose colours you are wearing look like getting the runs, when lo! one or two wickets fall, and your spirits go to zero, and the other side become proportionately exalted. It may be that the last man comes in when ten runs arc wanted: the excitement then cannot last long, but it is so intense or even painful, while it lasts, that men are positively afraid to face it. Many men retire into the bowels of the pavilion in order to avoid looking on. Cricket, during the progress of a match, may present every form of excitement or the reverse. The game may at one moment look an absolute certainty for one side, ten minutes after it looks an equal certainty for the other side; the downfall of a