But perhaps verse is not a happy medium through which to express an enjoyment of cricket. Phrases like “unwary shin” will intrude themselves, and, although Pindar used to celebrate with equally appropriate ardour the feats of generals and of athletes, the very idea of commemorating in heroic couplets Woolley’s two great test-match innings at Lord’s seems ridiculous. We have grown so accustomed to reading accounts of cricket matches in the prose style of the sporting press that any other treatment is impossible. Perhaps Mr Masefield will one day attempt an epic of the fifth test match at the Oval, but I doubt if it would be a success. It would be a quaint performance, as though one were to walk down the Strand in court dress of Jacobean cut. The jargon of a cricket report is unsuited to heroic verse, but it is indispensable. If, for instance, we were informed that Hendren, Snared into over-confidence, stept back, Swinging his bat as though he would eclipse The thundered violence of Albert Trott. Yet had he not correctly judged the flight Of the quick spinning ball. Aghast he heard Behind his back the rattle of the stumps, we should not be very much the wiser. We should prefer to learn of such a tragedy in straightforward narrative: “Hendren hooked Mailey to the on-boundary twice in succession; but, in an attempt to repeat the stroke to a ball that was pitched farther up to him and that went away with the arm, he was clean bowled.” Indeed, A. E. Housman’s “On an Athlete Dying Young” is the best serious poem that can be said to interpret any side of cricket, and that poem is written to a runner. But it is universal, for it contains the tragedy of all professional sport: Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out, Runners whom renown outran, And the name died before the man. Contemporary reference to any cricketer no longer playing is made in the past tense, “Tarrant was ...”; and how many of the enthusiastic Ovalites who recall so eagerly the great days of “Locky and Brocky” pause to consider that their hero is still alive?