"Bodyline" Bowling.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20881, 14 June 1933, Page 8

"Bodyline" Bowling.

Replying to the Australian Board of Control, which at the end of April submitted for general adoption its new rule against bowling intended to intimidate or injure batsmen, the Marylebone Cricket Club is very careful and judicious, but not too restrained to retort sharply. The new rule, of course, it has no difficulty in discrediting. To ask an umpire to read minds and motives and intentions and to penalise players and sides accordingly is both absurd and dangerous; and Australian cricket will be uninjured by the rule only if umpires ignore it. On the subject of the dispute, the reply does very little more than clear up the confusion between " leg-theory " bowling and short, bumping balls on or near the leg and reject entirely the suggestion that any English bowler during the recent tour directly attacked the batsman; and it is a perfectly good objection to the term " body- " line bowling" that it prejudges the matter. Controversially, it has been worth a great deal to Australia; in honesty, it ought not to have been used at all. The sooner it is dropped, the better, and the sooner Australia accepts the invitation to discuss the question through representatives instead of by correspondence, the better, also. But it is melancholy to think that the two greatest cricketing nations have to compose not one difference only, which threatens to break in irritation and resentment an historic series of games, but two; for the Marylebone Club complains strongly of barracking and of the authorities' failure to interfere or control it, and says that, unless it stops or diminishes, test matches can hardly be continued. The still more melancholy thing is that many people now will read this with more relief than dismay.