arms and wrists. If you go out of your ground to hit, you should forget the wicket-keeper: if not, your mind will be one way, your body the other. You must go far enough to cover the ball and drive it straight before you. Never try to pull a straight ball across you. There are many chances against you if you do. For you have only the width of the ball to hit at, while it may chance to rise suddenly or turn out of its course; but if you take your bat upright, straight down the wicket, and play on to the ball, you have the whole length of the bat; always taking care to play the ball with your bat, not the bat with the ball. Lay your bat on to the top of the ball, and don't pull your bat from the ground up to it. That is not Cricket. The bat was made to play the ball.
Never make up your mind for a certain ball before it is delivered. Your mind being prepared for one sort of ball and another coming, as is almost sure to be the case, there will most likely be an accident. How often you hear men say, 'I have not been used to this or that sort of bowling.' It's all nonsense, they ought to practise all kinds. If a fast underhand Bowler is put on for a change (what I call a trundling Bowler, who gives a ball that bounds three or four times before it comes to you), he often does execution, especially with the rising generation. Why?—they have only been practised at one style; then they say, the twist of the ball, hop-stride, and jumping before it comes, deceives the eye; they having been used to only one bound, and perhaps to one straight ball in the over, and the other being nearly always straight, they are rather alarmed, and, losing their confidence, the ball goes rolling through the wicket. In reality such balls are the easiest in the world to play. They want no judgement as to playing backwards or forwards. They only want a good full-faced bat put to 'em upright, with a bit of a drive forward. Play of that kind will beat any Bowler of that style. Though bowling shall be ever so bad, I don't say you shall hit away every ball. No, for it may by chance get up at the proper place, and make itself a good one. But you
