The Summer Field

141 Gentlemen had written to Bruce, to remind the RAF to keep their side of the bargain, in return for playing there (‘unless you can get it properly mown up to the road, you will have a hay crop there again shortly’). Age was another excuse. The Yorkshire handbook for 1928, reviewing the 1927 season when the county only finished third, admitted to an ageing team, ‘and the fielding though sometimes good gave evidence that age must give way to youth’. Another way of saying the same thing was that, as Leicestershire second team captain Jack Walsh put it after the 1957 season, ‘a young side should always be a good fielding side’. Why then, as he admitted, was the fielding by his young team the only part ‘below standard’? Why did season after season, generation after generation, see shortcomings in the field? * In his Young Player’s Guide , Derek Randall had reason to give more pages to fielding than batting or bowling. As he admitted, his exceptional fielding earned him a place in every team: first Retford, then Nottinghamshire and England; and, as important, it gave selectors a reason to keep him in the team longer, if his batting faltered. Nothing had changed since J.T.Tyldesley, writing in 1911, also put his selection for England down to his fielding, and urged readers: ‘Learn to love fielding as much as batting.’ Why did cricketers need to be told? Was it because, according to George Geary in 1936, bowlers and batsmen might be born, not made, but fielders could be made, ‘and the process is simple’. Geary and Randall prescribed much the same: Geary listed fitness (‘and that applies to any sport’), keenness, and concentration; while Randall put his success down to enthusiasm, and hard work. Perhaps fielding was at the same time too easy – as Geary noted, very few errors were due to genuine inability – and too hard, because whereas with the bat or ball you had something to do every minute, you could stand all afternoon without fielding a thing (to recall Mortimer Wheeler), and yet at any minute a stinger or a steepler (cricketers had a slang word for everything) might make you look a fool. Tommy Mitchell, the Derbyshire leg-spinner, proved what was possible. On being picked for the bodyline tour in August 1932, Plaindealer recalled Mitchell used to reduce his coach Sam Cadman ‘almost to desperation’. Mitchell supposedly said after one morning’s practice, ‘If I canna catch ‘em, I canna catch ‘em’. Mitchell had learned to throw straight and quick, and ‘no longer does Mitchell show himself so delighted at holding a catch that he puts the ball down and joins in clapping’. By January 1933, when Mitchell played for the MCC against New South Wales, Dr Eric Barbour in the Sydney Morning Herald was praising him as ‘the most brilliant of unusually active fieldsmen’. How did Mitchell manage it? Like Randall, he may have realised that good fielding would give him an edge over otherwise equally gifted bowlers (though bowlers more gifted as batsmen, such as Hedley Verity, would likewise pip a number eleven bat like Mitchell). Or, as, like everyone else, he had to field for about a third of his playing days, Mitchell decided he might as well enjoy it by mastering it. A clue came on the first day against NSW. Barbour described the England fielders as ‘like Fielding and Wicketkeeping