624 THE BADMINTON MAGAZINE who has himself perpetrated a volume of statistics may be permitted to throw out this hint towards innovation, while at the same time it must be emphatically stated that figures are not everything. Personality is of enormous value in county cricket. Mr. Gilbert Jessop is the supreme example; Mr. S. M. J. Woods, Dr. W. G. Grace, K. S. Ranjitsinhji, Braund, Albert Trott, and Mr. F. S. Jackson, in divergent ways, being also individuals capable of upsetting the best calculations as to results. But there is another type of personality, which has even more effect; I mean the influence exercised by Lord Hawke over his side, or—in University cricket— that of Mr. H. D. G. Leveson-Gower over the Oxford eleven of 1896. These things cannot be put into figures, and this influence is often exercised with a personal abnegation carried too far. But dozens of young cricketers may be developed under such auspices who would otherwise have never realised the early hopes of their friends. It is personality, too, which struggles against staleness. Men do get stale playing week after week right through the summer. It is healthy, this constant change of air and scene; pleasant to be in the cheery society of sporting comrades, and the importance of cricket is of course perpetually recognised by the regular members of county elevens. But unless a man has what musicians call “temperament,” or if he be not at the other ex­ treme of the nerve-scale, a stolid human rock, he will at times be jaded and stale. Even the keenest amateur, the man who scores his fifteen hundred runs season after season, amazingly enjoys the very rare holiday occasion when he can play in some village match or on some private ground “ far from the madding crowd.” Every organiser of a local week or of a house-cricket-week longs to get some “cracks” to take part. Engagements permitting, he will succeed if he hints that they shall bowl. The amateur never gets enough bowling in county cricket—with some dozen luminous exceptions—and if he bowls no better than the other folk in the house-team he derives six times as much enjoyment from handling the ball, for his feeling is akin to that of the small boy unexpectedly able to get his fill in the store cupboard. It is needless to state that the problem of county cricket is how to finish matches. Of course infallible fielding would settle all difficulties, but fieldsmen are only human—very faultily human, as every bowler knows. The development of the preparation of the pitch into a fine art is not likely to be checked, or at least it is not probable that any county ground will prove retrograde in this respect. Moreover, while the public growl at unfinished games, there is no question that the modern generation of cricketer is extremely captious about the wicket, and nothing would induce nine-tenths of the men .