THE SHORT-PITCHED LEG BALL needs no comment, save that, according as it is more or less to the wicket, you may,--1. Draw it; 2. Play it by a new hit, to be explained, a Draw or glance outside your leg; 3. You may step back on your wicket to gain space, and play it away to middle On, or cut it round, according to your sight of it.
But in leg-hitting, beware of a “blind swipe,” or that chance hit, by guess of where the ball will rise, which some make when the bat cannot properly command the pitch. This blind hit is often made at a ball not short enough to play by sight back, nor long enough to command forward. Parr advances left foot as far as he can, and hits where the ball ought to be. But this he would hardly advise, except you can nearly command the pitch; otherwise, a blind swing of the bat, although the best players are sometimes betrayed into it, is by no means to be recommended.
Reader, do you ever make the square hit On? Or, do you ever drive a ball back from the leg-stump to long-field On? Probably not. Clarke complains that this good old hit is gone out, and that one more man is thereby brought about the wicket. If you cannot make this hit, you have evidently a faulty style of play. So, practise diligently with leg-balls, till balls from two leg-stumps go to long-field On, and balls a little wide of leg-stump go nearly square; and do not do this by a kind of push--much too common,--but by a real hit, left shoulder forward.
Also, do you ever draw out of your ground in a leg-hit? Doubly dangerous is this--danger of stumping and danger of missing easy hits. If once you move your pivot foot, you lose that self-command essential for leg-hits. So, practise, in your garden or your room, the stride and swing of the bat, till you have learnt to preserve your balance.
One of the best leg-hitters is Dakin: and his rule is: keep your right foot firm on your ground; advance the left straight to the pitch, and as far as you can reach, and hit as straight at the pitch as you can, just as if you were hitting to long-field: as the lines of bat and ball form an angle, the ball will fly away square of itself.
My belief is, the Wykehamists introduced the art of hitting leg-balls at the pitch. When, in 1833, at Oxford, Messrs. F. B. Wright and Payne scored above sixty each off Lillywhite and Broadbridge, it was remarked by the players, they had never seen their leg-hit before. Clarke says he showed how to make forward leg-hits at Nottingham. For, the Nottingham men used to hit after leg-balls, and miss them, till he found the way of intercepting them at the rise, and hitting square.