The Laws of Cricket.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19715, 4 September 1929, Page 10

The Laws of Cricket.

An English writer on cricket, reviewing the results of a season's play under the new rules, expresses the opinion that giving the bowlers the advantage of a more deadly leg-before-wicket rule and of a larger wicket to bowl at has produced a higher proportion of matches played out to a win. The larger wicket has not stopped the best batsmen from making high scores, but has betrayed the slightly inferior ones. If this is true the season's statistics should bear it out by showing a sharper and more rapid drop in the averages, below the handful of imperturbable masters. But, while the critic notes that the bowlers were encouraged to bowl more regularly at the wickets, there is nowhere here any evidence that bowling has bettered with better opportunities. It remains as uncertain now as it was before the season began whether regulation is the sort of tonic that crieket needs; and very good judges suspect that when this uncertainty is cleared up the true remedy will be found in fresh cultivation of lost arts. Yet they are not altogether lost, of course. There is Rhodes, whom somebody the other day called the Ulysses of cricket, still spinning the ball with tireless fingers and inexhaustible cunning; and here and there are other bowlei-s who have taught their fingers the old command. But on the whole, when the swerve came in the old arts, laboriously learned, went out, and half the County bowlers of England, if the ball will not swing, can do no fetter than wheel it steadily up and down. Perhaps the charm and surprise of cricket, as of many other less serious and more serious activities, lie in rediscovery. Root's "leg trap" was an old trick relearnt; and Armstrong's leg-break was devastating in 1921 only because leg-breaks had been pounded out of the game years before, and forgotten. If we are not to go on enduring the undemocratic anomaly of two laws for cricket, one law for the aristocrats of the game and another for the middle and lower classes, then the bowlers must improve; and bowlers must improve themselves. This is the moral, too, of Mr P. G. H. Fender's book on last summer's England-Aus-tralia matches. Mr Fender does not think the English XI. was a good one —he thinks it was a weak side flattered by its foil, the still weaker Australian bowling.