AMIDST THE HYSTERIA and confusion about the Old Trafford wicket,
three things seem reasonably clear. The suggestion that the wicket had been doctored to suit our side at the behest of the English selectors was ridiculous and disgraceful. But the wicket did not last as long as it should have done. The sporting wickets of today are a great improvement on the doped and 'perfect' ones of the Thirties. The danger is that freak weather or a slight miscalculation (in this case the wicket seems to have been too closely mown) may make a wicket so 'sporting' as to put the side that loses the toss at too great a disadvantage. Still the wicket last Friday cannot, 1 think, have been very bad. Otherwise Lock would not have been more successful with the bat than with the ball. He made twenty-five sound runs but took only one wicket. And for most of the time on Friday the Australians were not in great difficulty. They batted for 205 minutes, and as The Times correspondent has pointed out, during the first eighty- five and the last sixty-five of these they lost only one wicket and that from a full toss. Between those two spells, when all the damage was done, the wicket can hardly have become unplayable. Whatever happens at The Oval, I hope Johnson wins the toss.
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