The Summer Field

194 Despite the shallow characters and the fantasy that novice foreigners could become as good as Sobers in months, Bonaventure foreshadowed much of cricket since. Cameras in nets capture batting and bowling; computers store the data, and computer programmes analyse it. Coaches, arguably, have taken much of the power and responsibility from pro’ players. Instead of players using their eyes and ears to work out how to bowl a batsman, and keeping a note of how they did it, coaches with computers do that work, and players do as they are told. The novel had the insight that computers could not make anyone play cricket well, or at all. Clyde surprised his employers and the Russians at the end by admitting that he and his teammates had played the all-stars as ‘ real cricketers’, without the plans. They gave up their ‘spring-wood’ bats for regular bats, and played from experience. As Clyde said before the all- stars game: ‘… our computer-planned training and coaching will not make a cricketer out of a man who has no wish to be one, or if he’s not physically and mentally suited to the game.’ * Luke Sutton said: ‘Look at the physical shape of the players – they’re athletes.’ Instead of beer and cigarettes, cricketers by the 2000s were having massages, and ice baths, and were swimming. They were going to the gym, long and often. Mark Turner, speaking with fellow Derbyshire bowler Tony Palladino at Derby in May 2013, when asked what he did in the close season, replied: ‘Get away from cricket, but doing gym work.’ Will Jefferson asked his father jokingly: ‘What did you do when it rained – go to the gym?’ Richard Jefferson replied that he played cards; or, when staying with friends in Yorkshire, bridge. Speaking in 2013, Richard Jefferson noted that bats now weighed ‘far, far more’ than 50 years before. A tall man, though not as tall as his son, he said: ‘I had two pound seven bats and there probably weren’t ten bats in the whole circuit as heavy as that.’ Denis Compton, he recalled, used a bat weighing two pounds four or five; 21 st century bats are two eight, two ten, or three pounds. ‘I picked up Will’s bat, but they pick up light, they pick up beautifully. Boundaries are brought in for the one-day game ... Fifty years ago, the ball seamed about all over the place and you had to have a good technique.’ In such a limited- overs game as T20, batsmen can take the risk of hitting sixes, and have the muscles to try it. Will Jefferson spoke of counties practising six-hitting, or in pro’ slang ‘clearing the ropes’: ‘I think they call it now range-hitting, when you are practising 20-20. They will need three or four people in the seats, gathering balls.’ Given this new 21 st century priority for pro’ batsmen – and stopping them is a new priority for bowlers – and the new obsession with their bodies, pros’ had no need to respect, or even know about, the past. When older generations complained that younger players no longer stuck around after play to talk cricket, the truth was that the young did not need what Sir Len Hutton in 1989 called ‘wise counsellors’, older players, and umpires, to learn from. We can romanticise the togetherness of the evening after competing all day. David Acfield, the Essex spinner, in the county’s 1980 To The Present and Beyond