Should I steal an hour from hard labour and go
to Lord's on Tuesday for the last obsequies ? I rang up to find out the score. Five Oxford wickets down for fifty something, and 136 needed altogether to save an innings' defeat. No sense really in getting there after the tea interval. But I got there. Score 96 for six, and two hours to go. That was obviously safe enough. Wickets were not falling quite fast enough (for a Cambridge man), but there was no hurry. Dowding was mak- ing too many runs,„and so was Mitchell, but when one was bowled and the other caught, both by McCarthy, that was that; only three rabbits (as batsmen, not as bowlers) left. But the rabbits, unaccountably, wouldn't behave like rabbits. They kept putting their bats very annoyingly where the ball was, and though they didn't make runs, except the gallant Coxon, they brought the inexorable clock very much into the picture. Then Marlar got Coutts, but by this time it was after six, and Cambridge needed forty runs to win. Jowett came in. How he survived his first over from Marlar no one who watched it can guess. But he did. On the last ball of the next over a run was sneaked. A Cambridge man threw down the wicket, but Jowett was home—sliding on his stomach and preceded by his bat. Sheppaid called it off as hopeless. The umpires scattered the stumps. Cambridge was left with a moral victory, but moral victories don't count, for much in the statistics.
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