INTERNATIONAL CRICKET.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume VIII, Issue 405, 28 April 1898, Page 11

INTERNATIONAL CRICKET.

We clip the following amusing parody from the St. James's Gazette:— The Cornstalk makes, amid hilarious cheers, The winning hit for five, or four or three; The noisy concourse slowly disappears, And leaves the field to retrospect and me. Now all is over, save the pens that scratch' Where special correspondents fill the sheet, Writing about this melancholy match With many a sound excuse for our defeat. Save where, by means of the Australian mail, Prince Ranjitsinhji sagely doth decideThat why the others win and why we fail, Is that our men are not so good a side. I Here, where the pitch is worn with many runs, Where the turf shows the print of nail and spike, The rubber done to our Colonial sons, Our colors on the cricket ground we strike. Here was it that Tom Richardson essayed, And, Jack Hearne, their choicest bowling tricks, And, trundling while so large a score was made, Found it so difficult to hit the sticks. Here was it that our batsmen’s vaunted skill, With some supreme exceptions, rare as gold, Put to the test, appeared, alas! as nil, Or next to nil, when Jones and Noble bowled. Haply some critic of the game will say, “ Oft have I seen them on their native swards, Slogging like Titans all the summer’s day, At Brighton, or the Oval, or at Lords. “This morn, where are the good ones that they stopped, Where are their mighty drivesand slashing cuts ? Where are the catches that they never dropped? They cannot play, as the phrase goes, for nuts.” Epitaph. Here rest the ashes : irritating luck May partly have constrained our men to yield j But still our batsmen usually got duck, Our bowlers could not bowl nor fieldsmen field.' And while his doleful plaint the minstrel sings, He adds a wish in his concluding line, That we may see a different state of things When next they challenge us in Ninety-nine.