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Updated: May 27, 2025
Gordon loved to sit in the pavilion balcony watching the white forms change across between the overs, the red ball bounce along the grass, the wicket-keeper whip off the bails, the umpire's finger go up. The whole tableau was so unreal, so idealistic. Then the school would come down after lunch with rugs and cushions, and would clamour outside the tuck-shop for ices and ginger beer.
Luck still befriended him: he bowled four wickets in twelve overs; the wicket-keeper stumped a fifth: the rest were "the tail," and disposed of for a few runs, and the total was no more than Huntercombe's first innings. Our hero then took the bat, and made forty-seven runs before he was disposed of, five wickets down for a hundred and ten runs.
Up comes the ball to the wicket-keeper, and forward darts Ned's bat over the crease. "How's that, umpire?" cries the wicket-keeper. "Not out!" "Time's up!" Oh, how we cheer! How we rush forward and shoulder Ned home to the tent. Never was such a close shave of a match! Ned himself by no means shares in the general excitement. "Why, what a hurry you fellows were in!" he says.
We might be b-beaten, but we'd make a stiff fight for the old Seminary." "Ye can bowl, Nestie," said Speug generously, as they went back to school at the trot; "ye're the trickiest overhand I ever saw; and Jock Howieson is a fearsome quick and straicht bowler; and for a wicket-keeper Dunc Robertson is no easy to beat. Gosh!" exclaimed Speug, as they wheeled into the back-yard, "we'll try it."
The eleven positions on a cricket team are called bowler, wicket-keeper, long stop, slip, point cover-slip, cover-point, mid-off, long-leg, square-leg, mid-on. The one at bat is, as in baseball, called the batsman. The two lines between which the batsmen stand while batting are called "popping creases" and "bowling creases." A game played with wooden balls and mallets, on a flat piece of ground.
The match was a draw now whatever happened to him. He hit out, almost at a venture, at the last ball, and mid-off, jumping, just failed to reach it. It hummed over his head, and ran like a streak along the turf and up the bank, and a great howl of delight went up from the school as the umpire took off the bails. Mike walked away from the wickets with Joe and the wicket-keeper.
Wright, having hit for five, and being unable to see what had become of the ball, started to run, as a matter of course. But the other batsman, seeing the ball go right into long-leg's hands like a bullet, cried, "Back!" Wright turned, and would have got back to his wicket if the ball had required handling by the wicket-keeper; but, by a mixture of skill with luck, it came right at the wicket.
The wicket-keeper knows what the Harrow captain said, but it does not bear repeating. Every eye was on his scowling, furious face as he returned to the pavilion; and the Rev. Septimus scowled also, because he had always maintained that any Harrovian could accept defeat like a gentleman.
Eventually they told me it removed the left bail, and struck the wicket-keeper a fearful blow on the chest. It was generally agreed that such a ball had never been bowled before. "'Twas a pretty ball!" as Tom Peregrine pronounced it, standing umpire in an enormous wideawake hat and a white coat reaching down to his knees, and smoking a bad cigar.
I am able, as an eye-witness on one of these occasions, to write of an incident which, I think, has been almost forgotten. It was within a year of the marriage of King Edward, then Prince of Wales, and Queen Alexandra. A ball had been hit almost to the boundary, but was stopped by a spectator close to the ropes, thrown in to the fielder, and smartly returned to the wicket-keeper.
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