Young Bradman

118 has been overlooked or not received some opportunity’; except that was not the same as saying that coaches selected and then brought the best out of the most talented. That any sportsman like Bradman did far better than others implied that the more successful man did (or avoided) something that the rest did not; he knew and applied something original. Modern life is based on such change – new objects and original ideas, that prompt new habits. Or, we are forever compromising between keeping what we are used to, and changing. In a 1923 article, the footballer Billy Gillespie challenged that assumption, by admitting there was something to the charge that football was ‘samey’. Did the average spectator want originality? he asked. If a player tried something different, and did not succeed at once, spectators complained. ‘For the average player, the line of least resistance is that of orthodoxy.’ The same was true for so much in life – you did as you were told by authority, your father, vicar or employer. Sir Francis Lacey, the secretary of MCC, wrote in the 1931 Wisden of how the staff at Lord’s were ‘taught the principles of coaching’, to then teach batting to the sons of members at Easter. That implied there was one set of principles; like a religion. Faulkner taught according to principles, ‘as I understand them’. Such dogma could become grotesque. ‘I start every boy or man pupil in the same way,’ Faulkner wrote in 1925. ‘I insist on their strokes being the opposite of what is known as the ‘two eyed stance’ for though I adopted the latter stance myself for many years I have now come to realise that it is entirely wrong.’ If Faulker was not right a few years before, what were the odds he was right now?! In The Cricketer in 1931, Sir Francis Lacey seemed to offer some leeway; he urged ‘perfect balance’ and a motionless head when batting, as part of ‘fundamental principles’. Such basics did not change, he said, rightly, as they are a matter of physics. How you applied them depended on ‘conditions’. Others made it a principle of not insisting on a principle. The Australian veteran Warwick Armstrong in his 1922 book The Art of Cricket said only that ‘all good players adopt a natural easy position at the wicket’. Boys were having the worst from both worlds: either they were not coached at all; or coached too much, as Sir Home Gordon said in The Cricketer in 1931, and ‘prevented developing their natural game, but made to play on standard lines, thus tending to mechanise their methods and not to use their intelligence’. This happened for powerful reasons, none easy to remedy. Adults who knew best could easily become, as Sir Home Gordon put it in his novel That Test Match , ‘coaching cranks’. As he put it, ‘ignorance always wants to instruct whilst mediocrity desires to stereotype’. Coaches wanted to be obeyed; all the talk about ‘fundamentals’ at least made you look at if you knew what you were talking about (and might keep you in work). Just as the Communist Party in Russia in the 1920s had to stamp out other rival political parties, and then any rivals inside the Party, because any dissent was a threat to Communism (whatever the Party said it was), so the Faulkner ‘school of cricket’ or any other had to insist that it was sound and all others were not. Otherwise, why put your trust in Faulkner, and not MCC? Bradman or machine?