The Summer Field

108 two boys might have asked for the same coach. Instead Lord’s ran its nets as it wanted. Or, Lord’s was looking to forestall complaints. If the service was uniform, or at least claimed to be, no-one could argue one son had a worse service than another. Or, as the home of the game, Lord’s insisted all its coaching was alike, because it taught what it called the ‘fundamental principles of cricket batting’. Lacey went into some detail – with underlining: ‘the bat has to meet the line that the ball is making either in the air (full pitch) or on the ground’. Two main points followed, he added: keeping the head steady, to work out the line of the ball; and meeting the ball with a straight bat. Playing straight – ‘perfectly straight’, WG said in 1895 – carried meaning. ‘We,’ wrote Lionel Tennyson, taking sides over bodyline in January 1933, ‘cannot allow ourselves to be put in the wrong.’ English players could only play one way – the right way. C.T.Studd, as good an authority as anyone (Eton, Cambridge, MCC and England, then an overseas Christian missionary) wrote in the Sheffield Green Un in May 1908: ‘In truth we may say cricket teaches us the love of fair play.’ That implied any other way was unfair. By keeping a ‘straight bat’ in life generally, you did right to your fellows, your country, God and the Empire. As Studd summed up, be loyal to the team (‘even if you should have gone in first’) and, as with the Christian faith, your unselfishness would be rewarded, in unspecified ways. Leaving aside whether the meek do inherit the earth, or open the batting, was it sound coaching to make one style fit all? In that 1895 Strand Magazine interview, W.G.Grace suggested the very opposite: ‘every player possesses a style more or less distinctive’. Even ‘no particular style’, as Sir Stanley Jackson once described WG’s batting to H.S.Altham, was a sort of style (‘certainly no grace, but a complete and dominating efficiency’). In chess, where you moved the piece mattered; no-one cared how gracefully you moved it. In cricket, style impressed – or rather, lack of style could offend. Mat Wright was coach at Eton while Freeman Barnardo was there until 1937. The Conservative prime minister Lord Home, in his autobiography The Way The Wind Blows, recalled Wright as the ‘canny Yorkshireman’ (is there any other sort?!) who coached him in the late 1910s. When the earl’s son was ‘scratching about’ with the bat, Wright told him: “For God’s sake sir, if you must miss – do it in style.” Grace asked: why try to change a lad with an ugly style, if he hit runs? If a straight bat was all, why did a photograph in The Strand Magazine show Grace’s bat at a right angle to his body, cutting? Batting was like chess; once you learned what the pieces could do, you had to forever work out how to counter the other man’s game. In a June 1936 article, Bill Copson of Derbyshire pointed out ‘the elementary rules which a fast bowler must follow’. Anything freakish did not succeed; too long a run used too much energy; so did jerks or jumps, which also upset the rhythm of the run. What worked were a straight arm; body behind the ball when you let go; timing and control. * Coaching