THE Hauraki Plains Gazette With which is Incorporated THE OHINEMURI GAZETTE MONDAY, WEDNESDAY, FRIDAY “Public Service” WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1950 A FASCINATING ANTIDOTE

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 60, Issue 4368, 13 December 1950, Page 4

THE Hauraki Plains Gazette With which is Incorporated THE OHINEMURI GAZETTE MONDAY, WEDNESDAY, FRIDAY “Public Service” WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1950 A FASCINATING ANTIDOTE

A provoking game this cricket, but always fascinating whether played on a city ground or on a wide sward where the pavilion is z a tree and half a dozen whiteclad groups dance like motes to the click of bat and themuted “howzat,” while up drifts the scent of crushed grass, as completely right for the occasion as the smell of mint with new potatoes. At times this almost too-British sport becomes a game of very slow-motion living chess.. The utmost patience is required to watch it but, even so, one tarries, intending to leave but waiting for just another over.’ Then, as Winston Churchill said of one of his ancestor Marlborough’s battles, therecomes as grqat a surprise as though one chess player had overturned the board and seized his opponent by the throat. * So did the not-very-inspiring-cricket of the earlier part of theM.C.C. tour give way last week to a sort of beserk fury which bowled down Australian wickets. Then came the deluge and the death grapple on the Australian “paddy field” with shrewd declaration matching manoeuvre. > Hardly cricket, ancient gentlemen might say, but they would, be wrong. The salt of cricket lies in the fact that the. minuet: on a perfect wicket can give way to the frenzied boogie-woogie of a Brisbane test imbued with something of the hectic spirit of baseball. Then the oppressed bowler comes into his own, and the star/batsman, more in sorrow than in anger, makes crossbat swipes that a few years earlier would have earned him a crack* with a cricket stump from a short-tempered games master. It may be 100 soon to hail a renaissance in English cricket and to say beyond doubt that the pendulum is swinging from Australian supremacy, but one cait at least look forward keenly to the rest of the tests. The Australians can say: “Well, we won anyway,” and the Englishmen take heart by what so easily might have been. But beside all this the game is an excellent antidote to worry over sterner things. The tremendous interest taken in it in these days of international tension well illustrates the fortunate capacity of the British Commonwealth peoples to divide their attention between the good and the bad things of the world. Perhaps even the bumper bowlers in the Kremlin are a little bewildered as their agents report how for a day or two the cricket, headlines matched those given their , stooges. They should not read wrong lessons from it as past dictators have done to theircost.