Young Bradman

117 in 1926 Faulkner brought out a book with a strikingly passive title, Cricket: Can it be Taught . Faulkner admitted facing ‘the croaking of pessimists’ that you either could not, or should not, tell boys how to bat. As Faulkner began: ‘Many Australians have contended also that English schoolboys receive too much coaching and suggest thereby that English cricket would materially benefit if young fellows were left to their own resources.’ In 1955, a coaching manual by the New South Wales Cricket Association described Bradman as ‘the outstanding example of near perfection in batting efficiency’, and ‘our model for the description of the fundamentals of batting, the defensive shots’. In 1958 Bradman brought out his own textbook, the significantly-titled The Art of Cricket . Why, in the years in between, did coaches – mirroring the guarded reception by some critics – so seldom take young Bradman as their template? Some were Bradman enthusiasts. When covering the 1936/37 tour of Australia, the journalist Bruce Harris learned of the thousands of junior players in hundreds of teams in Sydney: ‘They have the example of Bradman, the boy from Bowral, to copy: to many thousands of them, he is the hero to be emulated.’ A long article by RA Young in The Cricketer spring annual of 1931 hailed him as ‘Nature’s Batsman’, ‘physically a perfect specimen’ and ‘such a perfect subject for study’. While Richard Young, an MCC tourist to Australia in 1907/08, did feature photographs of Ranji too, more materials to allow study of Bradman were around that were not thought of in Ranji’s heyday: ‘moving pictures’, and ‘flickers’ – booklets of pictures on one side of the page only, that you flicked to give the illusion of movement. Two things stood in the way of coaches taking up Bradman’s methods: rival methods, and whether coaches were skilled enough to teach any method. The bowler Cec Parkin in 1921 agreed on the need for ‘a really wise, clever, tactful coach’, for young bowlers and batsmen alike: ‘But not a man to cramp all individuality, mind you!’ As Parkin added, and many others agreed, the ‘slightest mistake’ by coaches could grow into a habit in a boy and spoil him. Likewise Alfred Dipper in his book Cricket Hints urged ‘continuous coaching preferably at the hands of a competent coach’. Faulkner, making the case for coaches, claimed that thousands of youths with the right temperament ‘are simply wasted because they have not been sympathetically helped to realise their potentialities’. Were coaches good enough to do good? For all the textbooks about what to coach, revealingly few coaches or those coached have spelled out what goes on between the two. Assumptions abound; we want to believe that every teacher is trustworthy, and rational; always knows what he is doing; and wants what’s best for the pupils. A coach is not going to admit he is as human as the rest; has his own interests; and what he teaches may be stale, or behind the times. He may be good at playing cricket, and understand what you have to do to be good at cricket (not the same things), but bad at passing it to others. The pupil may be too immature to notice. Sir Home Gordon in The Cricketer annual for 1928/29 called it ‘practically inconceivable that much genuine talent Bradman or machine?