“I am very pleased with the success of Crawford, who is, in my opinion, the finest all-round man on the side.
“It was never intended to send a representative eleven of England, but I thought we had chosen a side quite worthy of upholding the cricket honour of the country. Apparently we were wrong.
“Our defeat cannot do any harm; in fact, it may lead to a lot of good, and if the South Africans visit us in 1907 they should command a great amount of respect from all the first-class counties, as, judging by the improvement in their play, they will give us some good games, and may even be a hard nut to crack for a representative English team.”
These quotations are taken from the columns of the Sportsman, April 3rd, 1906, and to them it is desired most earnestly to invite the attention of those patriots who wish to see English cricket maintain its supremacy. Let one regard for the moment these two gentlemen individually as Mr. F. E. Lacey, Secretary of the Marylebone Club, Prime Minister of Cricket, and Mr. P. F. Warner, captain of English teams sent to play against the Colonies, Colonial Secretary of the Marylebone Club, which up to the present time has, without any Opposition, assumed and carried on the Government of Cricket.
The position in which they find themselves at the time of making these disclosures to the Press is as follows:—
For some years past, since 1888, the cricket associations of South Africa have from time to time invited English cricketers to visit South Africa in order to assist in the development of the game in that country. The team under Mr. Warner’s captaincy is the fifth that has visited South Africa, the preceding ones having been under the private management of, 1888–9, Major Wharton; 1891–2, Mr. W. W. Read; 1895–6, and again in 1898–9, Lord Hawke; and now, 1905–6, under the management of the Marylebone Club, with Mr. P. F. Warner as captain.
Major Wharton’s team was in no sense a powerful one, and included some amateurs of obscure cricket origin; and they lost four matches in the course of their travels. Mr. Read’s team was a strong one, and lost no matches. Lord Hawke lost two matches on his first visit to Africa, but, profiting by this experience, returned in 1899 with an unbeaten record.
An opportunity was afforded to South African cricketers of trying their skill against English cricketers in the summer of 1904, when a team of South Africans came to England to play a comprehensive programme, which included twenty-two first-class matches, against the Counties, ’Varsities, M.C.C., and so on, with a special match, by request, against England at Lord’s. Our visitors were modest, and without suggesting a series of so-called Test matches, asked as a favour that upon one occasion, and that at Lord’s, the headquarters of cricket, they might be allowed to meet the full strength of England in order that they might learn an important lesson in the game of cricket. This match was played in the middle of July, and the Africans brought their best eleven to Lord’s, and gained a decisive victory by 189 runs. But they were unable to exult in their triumph, for the management of the Marylebone Club took so little pride in the team they had selected to represent England that the match was chronicled as “South Africans v. an English Eleven,” and all cricketers know that the words, “An English Eleven,” applied to a team condemn the team in one’s mind before one has read the names. So little enough credit was given to the Africans for winning the one match they had arranged against England at Lord’s; although anyone who, in common with the writer, watched carefully the whole course of the match from start to finish, must have realised that as they played then our visitors might on their day have beaten the pick of England.
The result of that tour worked out: matches played 22, won 10, lost 2, drawn 9, tied 1. The first match they lost was the second of their tour, at Worcester, and of this game “Wisden’s Almanack” says: “The South Africans had all the worst of the luck, as, after holding their own on the first day, they had on the second to bat on a ruined pitch.”
So there was not much disgrace about this defeat. The other match lost was against Kent at Canterbury, where the home team, for some reason or another, always show to advantage. Kent batted first, and we read that: “Helped by the condition of the wicket, which had never been perfect, Blythe was very difficult at the finish.” And so the Africans lost by 104 runs. To an unbiassed observer it would seem that if upon the two occasions when they suffered defeat the Africans had happened to have won the toss, they might well have added a couple of wins to their record instead of losses.