The actual conditions prevailing in the Gray-Diggle matches are quite simple. Diggle, in endeavouring to win, is up against a mathematical impossibility, and this would be equally the case with Roberts, Stevenson, Inman, Reece, and the rest of them. One has only mentally to revive Peall in the heyday of his powers and practice as a spot stroke specialist, and to imagine his being pitted against players who had given little or no attention to his particular stroke to find a parallel case.
What happened, for example, in that memorable week in the middle of March, 1888? Every day except one Peall scored a break of over 1,000 (2,031, 1,498, 1,203, 1,192, and 1,125), whilst two years later he astounded the world with a break of 3,304, figures which make even the recent 1,000 to 1,300 Gray breaks appear almost puny.
As The Billiard Monthly pointed out two months ago, the Gray of to-day is the Peall of years gone by, the only difference being that Peall chose the shortest range pots on the board, whilst Gray has elected to practise and play the shortest range in-offs.
The only possible chance that any of our players have of beating Gray is to challenge him to the spot-in game. There would then be a very different state of the scoring board, and not many weeks would elapse before the unaccustomed phenomenon was witnessed of Gray holding a watching brief, whilst Diggle, Stevenson, and other top-of-the-table experts were reeling off hundreds and thousands, by means of the spot stroke.
"Why cannot they do it without the spot stroke, by means of ordinary top-of-table play?" someone may ask.
The reply is sufficiently obvious. With the spot stroke there is no covering of the balls, and only one ball to consider.
Nothing has to be done beyond steering the cue ball at each stroke to the rear of the spot in as nearly as possible a straight line with the corner pocket. The strokes necessary to accomplish this are few and comparatively simple, just as are the strokes necessary to retain the red ball, in the sister losing hazard stroke, in the central line of the table.
Not that we are endeavouring to belittle in the slightest degree the skill and the qualities that are involved in the compiling of big breaks by means of either stroke. But what we do say is that, given scrupulous care with each individual essential of every stroke, the wonder is rather that the spot stroke and middle pocket specialist ever breaks down than that he makes thousand breaks.
There could be set up on a billiard table two spring-controlled mechanisms which would do the middle pocket in-offs or the corner pocket pots all day long and for 365 days in the year, until things began to wear out and the running conditions ceased to be perfect. For the in-offs the mechanism would be set for the half-ball contact from an end spot of the D with the object ball two feet or a shade less up the central line of the table, and for the spot stroke the propelling point would be in a dead straight line for the corner pocket, and a trifle below centre to ensure the straight recoil, by means of which alone G. J. Sala once made 186 consecutive hazards.
The equivalent of this last-named performance in middle pocket play would mean the bringing back of the object ball 186 consecutive times in a dead central line to absolutely the same distance from baulk—a feat which Gray (who has always the choice of two pockets denied to the spot stroke performer) has not yet, we believe, effected.