The Summer Field

101 themselves in summer ‘too often unoccupied’. They grew dissatisfied, ‘… as it is only for the good cricketers that games are well organised’. As ever, if somebody did not bother about you, in return you did not have to bother about them. As for the few that did get coaching, how good was it? Contradictory or plain bad coaching could harm a child. In a 1911 article Albert Knight despaired of ‘some over-coached schoolboys lamely and tentatively pushing the bat forward where they vainly deem the ball to be’. In the 1921 novel That Test Match – a useful source because the author Sir Home Gordon could put all his unpublishable inside knowledge into it – the hero Paul Rignold was ‘the victim of all the coaching cranks’ at Eton after his fictional seven for 26 beat Harrow at Lord’s in 1913. ‘Coach’ in the Lichfield Mercury in 1936 hailed ‘concentrated practice’ in state schools for all except the medically excused. If boys did not find their way into adult teams, they at least became ‘intelligent spectators’. Or did they? Even if boys gained a grounding in the game, school-leavers aged 15 to 18 drifted away, so K.L.Gill, the Yorkshire representative on the Central Council of Physical Recreation, admitted in an undated report, probably from around 1960. The fault, as Gill hinted, lay with adults; if clubs did not have a junior section, would they consider starting one? If adults – schools, clubs and the state – truly wanted more youths to play cricket, or any sport, they had to offer the tools, which by the 21 st century might mean ‘cages’ in crowded and unsafe cities. While teenagers could have made their own ‘old boys’ teams, as Gill wished, youths did need adults to help them into the world. The more sensitive adults understood that you could never quite hold on to your own youth, or anyone’s. Poignantly Douglas Jardine, who achieved near as much as a man could in the English game, wrote to school captains in The Field in July 1934 that ‘there is no club or county captain who would not barter with him his greater experience for the keenness which is the schoolboy’s to command to go with the autocracy he may employ in wielding it’. Gradually school sports lost to modern teaching’s mania for what is quantifiable – and marketable – and distrust of all else. Earlier summer examination dates in schools were among the game’s woes that Tony Pawson listed in The Observer in April 1978. While the article was one of cricket’s contributions to an odd rash of 1970s national pulse-taking as Britain feared it had lost its way, Pawson was right. Exams ate into time for summer sports and were a profounder threat. Fee-paying and state schools alike were ever more judged on how many paper certificates children left with. Schools would not gain by teaching something unmeasurable, such as a sound forward defensive shot. No matter that society was mistaking exam grades and qualifications for actual knowledge, competence and the intangibles that the Victorian fee-paying school prized. Surveying Surrey youth cricket in the county’s 1975 yearbook, Tony Harris reported ‘an alarming decrease’ in cricket-playing primary schools. And Middlesex committee member Ted Jackson wrote in the club’s 1983/84 Schooling