Not Like Croquet

At noon, with the sun blazing down, Australia's best bowler let go with the first ball. It zipped in nearly as fast as a baseball pitch (about 65 m.p.h.), hit the ground just in front of the batsman, where he would have to hit it on the pickup. England's lead-off man blocked it off to one side. The fourth of the Test Matches, the World Series of cricket, was on.

For six days, thousands of Australians jammed into the green-turfed oval at Adelaide. The happenings there last week made mere squibs in most U.S. newspapers, but they brought passionate growls from all over Britain and headlines in Shanghai and Johannesburg.

To many Americans who don't know what they are talking about, cricket is a British eccentricity hardly less pansy than croquet. Americans condemn the game because it moves too leisurely, has too much ritualistic etiquette, and the players actually knock off for tea at 4 o'clock. One ex-G.I. who had seen a game summed up: "Believe me, in New York we'd have thrown pop bottles just to wake things up."

But in London last week, a considerable fraction of the population rose from warm beds and sat shivering beside wirelesses to hear the 7 a.m. news report of the Battle of Adelaide. A blue-faced cabby with frosted eyebrows said to a chum: "We didn't ought to have sent them." In a swank Pall Mall club, an elderly gentle man turned from the ticker mumbling: "Damn bad luck." All England knew and feared the name of Australia's great batsman, a wiry stockbroker, Don Bradman. With his help, last week, the Australian eleven held the British to a draw. The Australians had already won two and tied one, so (though there was a fifth match to play) the English had no chance of coming out even. London's sensitive press complained about Australia's Turkish-bath weather, "fit only for Nubian slaves."

All but the Irish. In the imperial scheme cricket has followed the flag (some Englishmen argue that there would have been no Irish problem if the Irish could have been induced to learn the game). And, contrary to U.S. curbstone opinion, cricket is not to be confused with croquet.

Though the ball is about the size and hardness of a baseball, none of the fielders wears gloves except the wicket keeper (catcher), whose gloves resemble a hockey player's gloves, with less padding. Batsmen wear leg pads something like a hockey goalie's, and thumb and finger guards. When cricket immortals like the late, great, bearded William Gilbert ("W.G.") Grace smote the ball, it practically tore a fielder's hand off.

A Nottinghamshire miner named Harold Larwood caused an international incident in 1933 with "body-line bowling": he tried to knock down Australian batsmen with beanballs, and sometimes succeeded. (The Australian Government complained to Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.) There is no foul line, so batsmen can hit in all directions. In placing fielders to take advantage of a batter's weakness, the bowlers can move a man up as close as ten feet from the batsman, in suicidal positions known as "silly leg" and "silly mid on." Cricket moves at less than half the pace of baseball, but--say its partisans --demands more science and judgment.

It has, like baseball, its fastball bowlers, its control bowlers and those who specialize in slow, tricky teasers ("googlies"). The bowler gets up speed with a run of from, 10 to 50 feet, must not bend his elbow when delivering the ball. His chief aim is to knock down the batsman's wicket (see chart) for an out. The batsman, who defends the wicket, seldom tries to swat the ball out of the park (though over the fence, "a boundary," is an automatic six runs). He hopes to whack out a low grasscutter, since a ball caught on the fly is out. If he thinks he can make it, he runs for the other wicket (66 feet away) and a teammate, ready at the other wicket, trades places. Every time they change places successfully, they have scored a run. A man stays at bat until he has been bowled, caught out, run out or ruled "l.b.w."* If he is still in when his side has been retired, (i.e., when ten men are out) he "carries his bat."

Don't Slug, Please. Sometimes one batsman, alternating with a teammate, stays UD all afternoon. A 'half-century (50 runs) causes decorous applause; a century a little more. Australia's Bradman, the greatest player of the game today, now making a comeback after getting fibrositis while in the Army, once made 334 runs in an innings. Slugging for the fences, a la baseball, is considered unrefined.

The British, seeing G.I.s play baseball during the war, generally regarded it as a sissy game, like the one played by little girls & boys and called Rounders. When Babe Ruth tried his hand at cricket in a visit to England in 1935, he swatted the ball so hard that he broke the bat. He glowed: "I wish they would let me use a bat as wide as this in baseball."

* Leg before wicket: when the umpire rules that the batter's leg -- -and not his bat -- kept the ball from hitting the wicket.

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