Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

115 You won’t find his name down as a bowler in any scorecards on CricketArchive, but when he became a coach he found himself bowling, slow left-arm, about 300 overs in the nets each week. That sort of experience once stood him in good stead in a match when he was playing against Leigh for a ‘Selected XI’ for whom the (then new) Essex keeper Neil Smith was behind the stumps. ‘We’d got about 230 and we tried all the bowlers. They were chasing our score, and they were going to knock it off easily: we’d only taken one wicket. So the skipper tossed the ball to me: I don’t know why, but he did. I bowled what I normally bowl in the nets, trying to keep it up to the bat, and I’d got a guy at short extra cover and they obligingly hit two straight to him. Then Smithy caught one and stumped one, then I bowled a great big long hop which was smacked straight at square leg. … I ended up with six for 30 and we won the game.’ That’s what 300 overs a week of practice can do for you. As a coach, Bob believed in constant encouragement for his charges, but demanded self-discipline from them. He drew his coaching techniques from many sources, and devised specific coaching methods to meet the needs of particular players. As an example, he told me that to help one of his early charges, a nine-year-old Stephen Peters, improve his judgement of length, Bob would bowl as fast as he could, and Peters got a point for every time he judged the length correctly: Bob got a point every time he didn’t. ‘We played for ten points. It started off about five-each, but then gradually after a few weeks he was beating me ten-nil, all the time. And he never looked back after that.’ Bob does not claim special credit for Peters’ later success in the game. He says he showed huge natural potential when he first saw him hitting a tennis ball with his father on the boundary at Upminster, and is happy to acknowledge that many other coaches had a hand in his subsequent development; but he certainly contributed helpfully to the development of the skills that led Peters to a century in the final when England won the Under-19 World Cup in 1998, and to a successful career with Essex and later with Northamptonshire and Worcestershire. All the time Bob was coaching for Essex, he was continuing to play club cricket. 186 He made his last appearance in the Westcliff first eleven at the age of 61 in the mid-1990s. For a couple of seasons before that he had played for Leigh-on-Sea, but Westcliff invited him back to cope with Barbadian quick bowler Hattian Graham, who was due to arrive at the club, courtesy of Trevor Bailey and Keith Boyce. ‘So he duly arrived and he was quick but erratic, so I am going all over the place; he was great fun.’ After a while, Bob yielded his place in the Westcliff first team to a youngster whom he had coached, and after a period in the second team he was invited to rejoin Leigh as their first-team keeper for a few seasons. At the same time he ‘carried on playing any cricket that was going; for the Forty Club and touring teams, and all sorts.’ Cricket was for a while principally a mid-week activity; but you can’t keep 186 He also made a final appearance in a non-championship Second Eleven match in 1985, aged nearly 51, in an early-season game against an Essex League XI on his home ground at Westcliff. A Life in Cricket