CRICKET

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 14 November 1925, Page 14

CRICKET

NOTES

T)io meeting ot the two local tennis to-day has.caused the liveliest interest among the members, and all approached the match determined to do their very be5t..."... *

,So far the younger members of the Excelsior team have shown much more promise than in any other team in the competition. Several have don'e re marknbly well,, both .in batting and in bowling.' The future of the Hawera Club when the young players are coming along is very bright. They should be encouraged in every way possible. It seems much to be regretted that arrangements could not be made for : visit from an official coach or from an amateur, say one of the good city players,/ who could be here a few days and give the young players of promise practical hints.

There are also several young play ers in the Okaiawa team who are shap ing well and putting up good perform anees. They also should be encour aged by the older members.

But there is one aspect of the game in which all may excel if they will take some trouble, and that is in fielding. And actually it is onto of the most useful. The good fieldsman with a sure pair of hands who can take everything that comes within reach and who sometimes gets a catch that looks impossible, is an asset to his side, whose value can hardly be over-estimated. Besides keeping down runs, if .he can take a good batsman before the latter gets set. the result may cjuite likely be a breakup of an innings that, were the catch missed, might mean fifty or more runs additional. But even the best fieldsman has a. lapse at times, and few there are who cannot recall such a lapse when, they have felt worse even than the bowler after missing a catch and seeing the batsman going on to make a big score. In such a case the fieldsman feels he would like the earth ter open and let him out of sight.

It is good to see that one of the leading English cricketers is optimistic about the chances of England against Australia in the coming season. Hon. Lionel Tennyson gives excellent advice to cricketers* about keeping fit, and alleges that it is that aspect of the game which helps the men of Australia to keep ahead in such keen contests.

; While the sports governing bodies both in England and abroad are spending much time and thought in finding a satisfactory definition of an amateur, a writer in an American contemporary supplies the following amusing suggestion : ‘ ‘An amateur is one who can give six days a week to his sport for six or seven months in a year without being wealthy or without bothering over a job.”

According to an English, exchange, Winston Churchill will have something to answer for if, by putting a tax on silk stockings, the cycling girl takes to wool instead of the prettier stuff. Some, at least, of the picturesqueness of the road _will have departed.

One has got so used to putting Clem Hill and Noble into any imaginary eleven of ? the world’s best cricketers that the list given by E. H. D. Sewell (who has known pretty well all of them) in hie recent book of reminiscences comes as a shock. He puts Grace, Ranji and Trumper “on pedestals by themselves,” after which he proceeds to “rank the best batsmen right down to 27.” It is a queer list. Hobbs is twelfth. The Australians are: Hill, fifteenth; Noble, sixteenth; Macartney, nineteenth;- and Bardsley, twenty-fifth.

What is the most thrilling incident in the life of a sportsman? One sport answers: “I have known many glorious moments in other sports—my first tiger, my first stag, mv first salmon, my first woodcock, my first century, at cricket, holing out in one at golf. None, however, came up to the thrill of seeing my horse carried first past the post.” What was wrong with the others when the winner had to be carried first past the post? A GOOD STORY. In “Cricket Memories,” Mr Edward Rutter tells the following story of a remarkable batting feat in the early seventies by the Rev. J. F. Scobe-11, a Harlequin, who was twelfth 1 man in an Oxford eleven:—He wag at the moment a curate in Devonshire, and sent thrill through the whole of the West Countrv, making 41 in a single over of four balls—three “tens” and an “eleven”— all run out, and no overthrows. This astonishing and, I should imagine, unparalleled feat, was performed while playing against the Plymouth Garrison ort their own ground—which last, I believe by the extent of one side of it and all that on a slope, lent itself to a sensation of this kind, though nothing like it had hitherto been bccomplished. REMINISCENCES. Writing of S. M. J. Woods (Sammy;, one of the greatest cricket and football players of his time, “Reminiscences,” a critic in that unequalled weekly, London Punch, says: “He writes just as ho used to play: he gets down to work at once and without any frills gives us of his best. One thinks of Mr. Woods as an Unusually brilliant player: he wa3 more than that. He was a very great sportsman to whom an umpire was always a man to uphold and not to cavil at. By his example in the field he did more for the games he loved than lie in his modesty will ever allow.” Surely never was a greater or more sincere compliment paid a man of sport.