The Summer Field

112 natural eye and hits the ball in a way you do not usually see in village cricket. It strikes me that with coaching and training he might develop into something good. At any rate he is worth a trial. What, if anything, happened? Brewin never played for Leicestershire. ‘Before and since the war there have been trials innumerable,’ the columnist ‘Reynard’ wrote in the Leicester Sports Mercury in July 1920. Few ‘caught the eye of the experts’. Reynard wondered if selection and coaching were ‘rather haphazard’; ‘certainly the time is ripe for putting this part of the organisation on a sound, businesslike basis’. You could dismiss the grumbles of the disappointed, but not the doubts of the successful, such as Derek Randall. In his 1980 book The Young Player’s Guide to Cricket , the Nottinghamshire and England batsman recalled having ‘the right connections’ who ‘made sure that those who mattered at Trent Bridge knew’. Randall said: ‘Scouting and coaching used to be a very disorganised business and I am convinced that many good youngsters have been missed because of this.’ Coaching has become more organised, for profit: such as the dozens of Easter and summer holiday courses for boys and girls in early-retired Lancashire and England all-rounder Andrew Flintoff’s name (‘I try to visit every Academy I can’). Or, holiday resorts abroad offer to coach your children. This market takes care not to promise anything definite; only fun, and time for parents to relax. If merit alone does not earn you a place at the Andrew Flintoff Academy, only a credit card payment, will a boy or girl of merit make it in the game? The doubt nagged at Randall: ‘… although I like to think I had enough talent to have broken through anyway, I sometimes wonder.’ It nagged at him because it’s such a profound, unanswerable question: are our lives predestined, decided by chance, or can we make our own destiny? Your answer might depend on whether you were picked or not. Coaching