Every length ball is difficult to play back, just in proportion to the ease with which it could be covered forward. A certain space, from nine to twelve feet, before the crease is, to a practised batsman, so much terra firma, whereon pitching every ball is a safe stop or score. Practise with the chalk mark, and learn to make this terra firma as wide as possible.
The Draw is so called, I suppose, because, when perfectly made, there is no draw at all. Look at fig. 2. The bat is not drawn across the wicket, but hangs perpendicularly from the wrists; though the wrists of a good player are never idle, but bring the bat to meet the ball a few inches, and the hit is the natural angle formed by the opposing forces. “Say also,” suggests Clarke, “that the ball meeting the bat, held easy in the hand, will turn it a little of its own force, and the wrists feel when to help it.” This old rule hardly consists with the principle of meeting the ball.
The Draw is the spontaneous result of straight play about the two leg stumps: for if you begin, as in fig. 1., with point of bat thrown back true to middle stump, you cannot bring the bat straight to meet a leg-stump ball without the line of the bat and the line of the ball forming an angle in crossing each other; and, by keeping your wrists well back, and giving a clear space between body and wicket, the Draw will follow of itself.
Fig. 2.
The bat must not be purposely presented edgeways in the least degree. Draw a full bat from the line of the middle stump to meet a leg-stump ball, and, as the line of the ball must make a very acute angle, you will have the benefit of a hit without lessening your defence. “A Draw is very dangerous with a ball that would hit the leg stump,” some say; but only when attempted in the wrong way; for, how can a full bat increase your danger?
This mode of play will also lead to, what is most valuable but most rare, a correct habit of passing every ball the least to the Near side of middle stump clear away to the On side. This blocking between legs and wickets, first, obviates the ball going off legs into wicket; secondly, it keeps many awkward balls out of Slip’s hands; and, thirdly, it makes single runs off the best balls.
Too little, now-a-days, is done with the Draw; too much is attempted by the “blind swipe,” to the loss of many wickets.
Every man in a first-rate match who loses his wicket, while swiping round, ought to pay a forfeit to the Reward Fund.
The only balls for the Draw are those which threaten the wicket. To shuffle backwards half a yard, scraping the bat on the ground, or to let the ball pass one side the body with a blind swing on the other, are hits which to mention is to reprove.