The majority of cricketers, we are happy to say, are not open abusers of umpires and their decisions, though a considerable number have earned this unenviable notoriety. But by far the greater proportion of batsmen, though not open cavillers at the umpire’s verdict, always refuse to allow that his judgment, when adverse to them, is correct, and especially in cases of l.b.w. It is one of the most extraordinary things connected with the game that, no matter how straight the ball may have pitched, how low down it may have hit the leg, and how straight it is going off the pitch to the wicket when stopped by the opposing leg, there is not one batsman in twenty who will allow that he is fairly out. ‘The ball pitched off the wicket;’ ‘It would have gone over the wicket;’ ‘It was twisting like anything and would have missed the wicket;’ and ‘How could it be out? I hit it hard,’ are the usual excuses that are made to a knot of the crestfallen batsman’s friends and sympathisers after his return to the pavilion. Sometimes, no doubt, one or more of these excuses may be perfectly true, and the batsman has been unfortunately dismissed by an error in judgment on the part of the umpire; but in far the larger number of instances they are simply sham excuses invented by the player to cover his own discomfiture. In some cases a batsman may really believe that the ball would have missed the wicket or did not pitch straight, and if so he has a perfect right, if he thinks fit, to tell his own friends what is opinion is; but as a rule the umpire’s judgment is right and the batsman’s is wrong. The mere fact of a ball hitting the leg when it is pitched _so nearly_ straight and would have _so nearly_ hit the wicket as to justify an appeal to the umpire, shows that the batsman has seriously erred either in his judgment of the pitch of the ball or in his stroke. He has made a mistake--the ball hitting his leg is a proof that he has done so; and yet, with this proof staring him in the face, he comes out and states positively what practically comes to this: ‘The ball must have been very nearly straight and would have very nearly hit the stumps, or else the bowler would not have asked; I mistook the pace, or the pitch, or the flight of the ball, or all three of them at the same time; but now that I have had time to think over it, I know for certain the ball was not pitched straight or would not have hit the wicket.’ This is the logical conclusion of the vast number of excuses that are made with regard to decisions of l.b.w. [Illustration: A clear case.]