The Summer Field

111 Well he was not very fearsome with me that day. I shall never forget the words. He was very pleased at the way in which I had bowled. Keep trying, young man and you will get them out all right. I left him with the feeling that I was walking on a feather bed. Dr W.G.Grace was not in the habit of throwing compliments about to unknown young men. As Parker added, Grace told a west country reporter and Gloucestershire invited Parker for a trial. A century later, the England women’s bowler Holly Colvin was an 11-year-old playing in an under-15 tournament at Ampleforth College in north Yorkshire. Because she had hurt her right hand, she began bowling spin with her left hand. As she recalled in the London Evening Standard in 2013, Don Wilson - the former Yorkshire and England left-arm spinner, then MCC and Ampleforth coach - told her: ‘Oh, you’ve got a lovely action, how long have you been bowling spin?’ “Two minutes”, I replied, and he said, “You should continue on doing it,” and I got bowler of the tournament that week.’ While no-one would begrudge Colvin or anyone their chance and good fortune, she was playing for one fee-paying school (Brighton College) at a tournament hosted by another. What chances would Hobbs, Hammond and Freeman (and their sisters) have had in the 21 st century? Another player from a fee-paying school, Luke Sutton, the Derbyshire and Lancashire wicketkeeper of the 2000s, saw all sides. At Millfield School in Somerset he volunteered to ‘keep the wickets’, thinking it meant looking after wickets. As a model player – articulate, insightful, and ready to take responsibility - he responded to the ‘phenomenal’ Lancashire coach Peter Moores, whose motto Sutton recalled was: ‘“You train dogs and you educate people” — he educated you as a person.’ Not all coaches, or those coached, were as outstanding, Sutton admitted. Younger players could be intimidated by an older coach: ‘Not every coach is perfect, and a lot of players have to look at themselves.’ As the coach’s job depended on the players’ success, and, by definition, for every winner there has to be a loser, coach and player could easily fall out. Moores and Kevin Pietersen as England coach and captain fell together in 2009; Moores’ second time as national coach was no happier. * The greater, yet seldom admitted, failing of coaching was not with the players that made the first teams – they could look after themselves – but with those that never made it. Unknowns leave little trace; such as F.H.Brewin, of the Leicestershire village of Evington, whom the landowner Lieutenant Colonel E.C.Packe wrote about in June 1926, to county club honorary secretary Dr Robert Macdonald (yet another in English cricket with an Australian background, having played for Queensland as a young man). Packe enclosed a carefully hand-written letter from Brewin hoping for an ‘invitation to the county ground’. Packe went on: He plays for the Stoughton CC and strikes me as being a likely lad for a cricket professional as a bat. Of course he is quite raw and untrained but he is quite young, about 18. He is also very keen with a good Coaching