The extraordinarily free use of safety tactics in the championship match just terminated between Inman and Reece draws attention to the general question of safety play in billiards. During the first week Inman gave no fewer than 97 misses, or ball placings after contact that represented misses, and Reece 76. In addition, Inman went 22 times to the table without scoring and Reece 68 times. The result was the extremely meagre week's scoring average to Inman of 24.09 and to Reece of 21.81, or not greatly more than one expects from the best amateur champions, and ludicrously below the possibilities of aggressive championship play, as displayed, for example, by Stevenson, in the final heat of the professional tournament in 1907, when the then champion averaged 89.83 during the entire week.
This is not to say that even Stevenson or others in championship matches have been content to play the aggressive game, and our criticism in this connection is not levelled against any particular player, but against the theory that seems to obtain amongst professionals that in a championship struggle it is safety rather than courage and attack that is likely to lead to success.
Turning up past records, we find that when Stevenson beat Dawson for the old championship in 1900, he gave 40 misses to Dawson's 29, and averaged 37.96 to Dawson's 27.03. On the other hand, when Dawson beat Stevenson in 1901 and 1903, he gave 54 and 45 misses to Stevenson's 51 and 55, and averaged 37.31 and 31.27 to Stevenson's 23.92 and 30.13. When Stevenson and Inman played their first championship match, Stevenson gave 119 misses in the nine days and Inman 123, and their averages, when the match was broken off from an unavoidable cause, were 25.13 and 25.00.
These figures taken together would seem to show that, other things being equal, success is by no means assured to the player who systematically closes up the game. In two cases misses and averages are about equal, and in the two other cases they cancel each other, for when Stevenson gave eleven more misses than Dawson in 1900 he won by 9,000 to 6,406, but when he gave ten more than Dawson in 1901 he lost by 5,796 to 9,000.
If the records of all the championship matches that have been played were overhauled, and if the figures as to misses and averages or totals were extracted from them, we think that the futility of persistent safety tactics as appreciably influencing the issue would be clearly demonstrated. A safety move naturally provokes a retaliatory safety move, just as brisk play begets brisk play. One player—when the contestants are of equal calibre—naturally takes his cue from the other, and when this is the case the only result of slow and hesitating play is to weary spectators and demoralize the combatants. To see two brilliant players, who have, in free play, made breaks approaching a thousand, hesitating and doubtful with regard to the simplest shots, and almost in a convulsion of anxiety between the delivery of the stroke and the pocketing or other intended objective of the cue ball, is in itself an eloquent commentary on the nerve-destroying class of play that prodigal safety tactics infallibly lead up to.
This being said, however, let no reader of The Billiard Monthly imagine that we have any desire to decry safety play in principle, or that we consider that it has no uses, and should, by mutual arrangement betwixt players, be abolished. On the contrary, we would go so far as to say that of two evils —excessive safety strokes and no safety strokes at all—we should prefer the former. But we would have such safety strokes, whether in social or club games, or in exhibition, money, or championship matches, confined to positions in which a score is not, according to the capacity of the player, fairly and reasonably on.
A familiar example of what we mean may be given.
The white is inadvertently potted and the red is left in a position from which the chances are two to one against a score. No player who knew anything at all about the game would neglect, under these circumstances, to make the double or single baulk, run a coup, or in some other way play for safety. When, again, the balls are running persistently badly for a player and courageous attack fails to mend matters, a well-judged safety move may easily lead up to a scoring position, as the result of failure by the opponent to reply, and—which is even more important— to a re-establishment of confidence and equanimity. But the monotonous reiteration of safety in events small or large, and which is born of the superstition or bogey that if the other man only gets in this once he will go on scoring for ever, is another thing altogether, and one which, in the interests of the game of billiards as a public spectacle, is not, in our judgment, a feature to be at all encouraged.
Boxers who sawed the air around each other without coming to practical exchanges, or batsmen who blocked, blocked, blocked, until the bowling became loose, would be subjected to remarks from the spectators. Boxing, we know, stands on a somewhat different plane from billiards, as it is practically blow for blow instead of the possibility of a big break in reply to a single faulty stroke, but in cricket the argument is reversed. Once let the ball find its way to the wicket and the batsman is done for, so far, at any rate, as half the match is concerned, whereas in billiards numberless chances of retrieval will still occur until the game is far advanced. True, the downfall of one batsman does not necessarily mean the loss of the match, as is the case in billiards, and there is no such thing as an individual cricket championship, but when all points are taken into consideration we think it will be conceded that any game or sport suffers from undue timidity on the part of its exponents, and that, given certain obvious and necessary exceptions, the players themselves suffer in an equal degree. The time has not yet arrived for the point to be legislated upon, but professionals may do well to remember that the old cushion-crawling (much honoured in its time) has already passed away and that limitation of consecutive non-miss safety dispositions would be equally within the province and powers of the governing authority,