"How to explain the fascination that cricket exerts? It is not simple. That it should attract the proficient is understandable, although they are liable to continual mischances and mortifications such as no other game presents; but the curious thing is that it attracts the incompetents as well; those who never make a run, and cannot bowl, and yet, doomed only to dreary waiting in the pavilion and to fatiguing fielding, turn up punctually on every occasion, hoping for the best, and even (such is the human heart's buoyancy) expecting it. There is no other game at which the confirmed duffer is so persistent and undepressed. It is for the experts, victims of misfortune, that depression waits; it is they who chew the cud of bitterness."