The Summer Field

105 Chapter Twelve Coaching ‘It is obvious that he considers the demonstration a waste of time. He can tell us what to do, but we could not possibly do it.’ Bernard Hollowood, Cricket on the Brain (1970) recalling coaching by Sydney Barnes Turn up early to a county 20-over game and you might watch the pros’ warming up – or merely passing the time? – by playing football. It is amusing to see how the players cannot help competing; and poignant that they laugh and joke, as if football gives them pleasure that the game they are paid to play does not. You can tell the overseas players; only they look clumsy. That’s not because they are worse ball players. Rather, the Australians and South Africans did not trap and pass a football as the Englishmen did for hundreds of hours on school playgrounds. In a July 1936 article the Kent and England wicketkeeper Les Ames said he had always played ball games; it gave him ‘ball sense’. He defined it as ‘a kind of sixth sense’, sometimes so developed ‘as to be almost uncanny’. You used ball sense without thinking, like smell or taste, to anticipate the very near future; whether the batsman was likely to send the ball your way; or that a hot drink might scald you. Whereas you could not stop seeing or hearing, unless you put your hands over your eyes and ears, ball sense did not come naturally. Nor did concentration on what mattered, when it mattered. As Aidan Crawley wrote in The Field in May 1936, when batting, he had to forget spectators, or the whiteness of the empty benches at Lord’s; he had to forget the ball before, even if he hit it for four, ‘and give all his faculties to the next ball’. ‘Watch the ball, watch the ball,’ David Steele kept telling himself, batting on his debut against Australia in 1975. To know that such mental work was helpful, and even possible, might take a player years. Crawley quoted Douglas Jardine saying he had never really learned to concentrate until he was 28. You learned outside school, and well beyond, things not on a school curriculum: from books and conversation, watching others, besides coaching – whether formal tuition or a chance word. * Coaching, tutoring in what W.G.Grace in that 1895 interview with The Strand Magazine called ‘the rudiments of the game’, had as long a history as the game itself, because youths always wanted to better themselves – or needed telling that they could, and should improve. Few were as obliging as Sam Redgate at a benefit match at Derby in August 1850. Once ‘the finest bowler in England’, according to the Derby Mercury , ‘through a