XXVIII.—Fielding a low ball with one hand: the opposite leg is fully extended.
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is good except for the feet. It teaches one to bend quickly, to extend quickly; it cultivates pluck and patience and observation, since the wicket-keeper must stand firm and wait and watch each ball if he hopes not to be hurt.
Every cricketer—I would go so far as to say every ordinary human being—should learn and practise throwing-in. Dr. Grace says that the player “should practise picking-up and throwing-in underhand.” At first this should be acquired as a separate accomplishment, till it can be incorporated and nearly ingrafted into the action of fielding, so that the whole process may become, as it were, a single movement started half-unconsciously by the sight of a batsman preparing to strike. The right action for throwing will be dealt with directly.
Interesting matches will do much to improve the keenness about fielding and therefore the care given to it. It is mainly because the American School and University baseball matches are so interesting, so absorbing, that good fielding is so sedulously sought after. We might arouse and sustain interest by variety; personally I should like to see handicap-matches occasionally introduced. A few kinds are suggested in another chapter. Tip-and-run is excellent training for the batsman as well for the fielders and wicket-keeper.
Subsidiary games and exercises are also essential. In these, as in matches, there should either be prizes or—as Mr. Edward Lyttelton advises—“the players should be encouraged to compete for colours to wear, which need consist of nothing further than a cap of well-marked hue. There is no reason to underrate the power of this enticement. Human beings have ever been addicted to ornament, and some have thought that great wars have been fought for very little else than the difference between one colour and another. It is quite certain that the authorization of caps for proficiency in cricket does wonders; and it is a stimulus quite innocent enough to be worth trying.” The same writer goes on to suggest that “it ought to be possible to devise a means of a social practice of fielding, which without involving the waste of time of ordinary match fielding, would ensure to each individual something to do, and some stimulus to do it.”
We might with advantage study American