On soft wickets, though many think otherwise, we believe that fast or medium-paced bowling is more difficult. This must be assumed only in the case of those fast bowlers who have power to keep their precision and pace on slow wickets, like Morley and Richardson. The variety of wickets, as is shown in the chapter on Bowling, is very great, and on the real mud farmyard sort of wicket it is generally safe to presume that fast bowlers cannot act. When there is a slight drizzling rain, which keeps the ball and surface of the ground wet, fast bowlers flounder about like porpoises, and the only bowlers who can act at all are the slow, though they are very much handicapped. But on the real bowler’s wicket, soft, yet gradually hardening by the effect of the sun, _cæteris paribus_, the fast or fast medium bowler will, as a rule, be the most deadly. The year 1879 was, on the whole, the wettest year for cricket that the present generation has seen, and it is instructive to turn to the result of the season’s bowling for the county of Nottingham. This county possessed in Alfred Shaw and Morley the two best bowlers in England--one slow, the other fast. Here is the analysis of each for Nottingham:-- Overs Maidens Runs Wickets Average Morley 725 349 867 89 9·66 Shaw 794 453 651 62 11·31 It will be seen from this pair of analyses that Morley’s is slightly better all round than Shaw, with the exception of the number of maiden overs. But maiden overs are not the final goal of the bowler’s ambition. They are only means to an end. The true bowler’s one idea is to get wickets. The reader will note that Morley, the fast bowler, got no fewer than twenty-seven wickets more than Shaw, which more than makes up for the latter’s greater success in bowling maidens. The year 1879 was doubtless a great year for bowlers, but none the less we doubt whether, taking a whole season’s work for a county, this record has ever been surpassed by any _pair_ of bowlers at any time, and it is as good an illustration of the truth of our theory that in wet years slow bowlers are not likely to succeed so well as fast or medium-pace.