Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

But there is no doubt that anybody Lester Charlesworth coached was likely to be schooled in caution. Edwards also acknowledged his friend was usually quite defensive and could be a hard, even domineering coach. He was ‘a stubborn left-hander’, said Ric, not at all embarrassed by being himself called the ‘master of the nick and nudge’ by Phil Wilkins in The Sydney Morning Herald : He taught me to defend. I was always opening the batting, always playing with kids much bigger than me. I suppose I developed a way of playing that might not have been as natural as if I’d just gone down and played cricket another way, which is what happened with the way I played hockey. My older brother [John] was a swashbuckler … The style he inherited brought him his first century for Dalkeith against rival primary school, Hollywood. In summer he was able to concentrate exclusively on cricket but in winter his enthusiasm was divided. Although small – even as an adult no more than five feet seven – he thrived in Australian football. One of his fellow-pupils was the much bigger Graham Moss, who in 1976 was to win the game’s highest honour, the Brownlow Medal, playing for Essendon in the VFL. Ric’s modest suspicion that Moss picked him for the primary school team mainly ‘because he fancied my sister’ is belied by the eventual ‘best-and-fairest’ award he won for Dalkeith-Nedlands in the under-14 competition. His enthusiasm for the sport, focused especially on the Claremont club, induced him to sleep outside Subiaco Oval to claim a spot on the boundary fence for the 1964 grand final of the West Australian Football League competition. But all the time he was playing football he had a growing commitment to hockey. Hockey was not normally played at primary schools in the 1960s but a keen teacher, Welshman Wilfred Thorpe, introduced the game at Dalkeith. With no other primary schools to play against, the chosen opponents were older teams from Perth’s leading girls’ private colleges, most of them located in the adjacent suburbs. Fifteen to twenty matches for the first eleven, for five years from the age of eight, outnumbered the games of football he played each year. Girls at least three years older provided stiff competition. The stipulation that the boys were not to wear boots on the ‘pristine surfaces’ of the college playing fields – among the best he was to see anywhere in the world – presented no problem 14 1952-1969