The Press Tuesday, January 17, 1933. Test Match Fever.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20756, 17 January 1933, Page 6

The Press Tuesday, January 17, 1933. Test Match Fever.

The abundant crop of Test match "incidents" and "scenes" will be .iudged least hastily and most tolerantly by those who remember that there have been <•' incidents" and "scones" before, soon forgotten. The dispute over the public schools match in England; Foster throwing down the ball and refusing to bowl; the indignant alarm v,'hen Gregory and McDonald damaged English batsman: to recall such occasions of heat and head-shaking—and the list could be endlessly lengthened--is to know, after all, how unimportant they were. The game easily survived them; and it is pleasant to hope, and not impossible to believe, that history will placidly repeat itself now. Unfortunately, it must be admitted that the present scries of Tests, though enly half finished, has made all quarrelsome precedents seem faint and feeble. In excuse for Leyland's challenge of Ironmonger's handkerchief, jardine's protest against Richardson's changing his ptacc in the field, and Woodfull's attack upon Warner and the team under his management nothing can be said except that the self-control even cf great sportsmen is not proof against the extreme and artificial tension in which they play Test matches to-day. They are partly l'esponsible for it, of course, because nothing compels men to let the determination to win a game become a humourless frenzy; but there is no need to divide the responsibility exactly among them, and the public, and the press. It is enough to say that what has happened is enough, on the soberest estimate, to make many people, the keenest lovers of cricket, wonder anxiously whether nothing but a long Test match holiday will cool tempers now far too hot and enable big cricket to be played again without big explosions. ~m t llil il ——