The Summer Field

109 Practice made perfect. ‘Practise, keep practising.’ old WG was ever saying to those who wished to learn of him,’ Albert Knight wrote in the Sheffield Green Un in July 1911. Or rather, practice could make perfect, because you might only harden your bad habit or ugly style. The following week, J.T. Tyldesley warned readers against copying Jessop’s hitting or Ranji’s leg glide, because those players had to practise before they had the confidence to use those strokes in matches. Practice made ‘ball sense’. Practice might even come ahead of what was best to win a match. In Leicestershire’s 1958 yearbook, the 1957 second team captain, the Australian Jack Walsh, wrote that to give younger players good practice, ‘on occasions I deliberately elected to bat on a green wicket to give the opening batsmen an opportunity to increase their experience,’ and other times Walsh fielded so that bowlers faced slow and wet wickets. Traditionally county second elevens prepared players for the first team, even if many would never make it. Practice usually was not on the field, but off, which took away the match interest. Tom Goddard, the Gloucestershire bowler, wrote in June 1936: ‘There is only one way to master the question of good length in bowling – by practice.’ He suggested putting a small piece of paper ‘or a dab of white paint’ on the ground, eight or nine feet from the popping crease (‘roughly where a good length ball should pitch’). As with riding a bicycle, playing arpeggios or writing shorthand, the basics had to become automatic. Once mastered, your mind could work on what lesser men would miss – a fielder out of place, the bowler’s expression (‘It is astonishing what the keen observer can gain in this way,’ said the Gloucestershire batsman Alfred Dipper in 1926 in his Cricket Hints ), oncoming traffic, or the music over the page. * Coaching After Consett Iron Company had windows broken, it warned workers against playing cricket in a notice dated June 1932, kept at Durham record office.