Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

162 The Coach and supporter of his own team, but you often used to see him having a chat with a bowler of the other side’; and upon the conclusion of a match ‘he would go and talk to a couple of their best players, [but] always with the approval of the other pro.’ His strongest suit, nonetheless, was his enthusiastic and boundless encouragement, on which Cowdrey had this to say: He was extraordinary … when you are in someone’s spell a bit, he was such an encourager … I was a person who probably lacked confidence, I think, as a youngster and to have someone like that saying, ‘Here, well done, come on, you can bowl this chap out’ and so on … it was very lifting. That’s the great thing really about coaching: it’s not the ‘do nots’ … but the great welling of encouragement pushing you forward … and if you got hit for four there was no sour face – he would laugh and probably say, ‘I’ve been hit for a few of those myself, I know what it feels like, and you’ll get hit again if you’re not careful’. This is lightening the load a bit rather than someone saying, ‘That’s a dreadful thing’, when suddenly you tighten up and are terrified of the very next ball. I think that’s clever, personally: I’m not a great believer in these people who put in the sergeant-major jack-boot stuff from Sandhurst, the sergeant-major who gives you a bloody cuff round the ear every time you do the slightest thing wrong. He was very encouraging, marvellous in every way. When rain prevented play there was cricket talk in the pavilion, for, as David Kemp recalled: ‘He was full of anecdotes and had a great fund of cricket stories – a marvellous man to talk to’. Wrightson mentioned that he would tell them about his adventures on tour in the West Indies; and Cowdrey said that he was one who ‘ate, drank and slept cricket: he was a chap who just poured out good fun about the game’. But when it rained there was also a billiards table available for the boys and Astill would show them tricks with cue and hand both for the sheer delight in such things and also for promoting similar tricks by spin-bowlers. Kemp further recalled that he taught us a game to while away the time on these occasions. You stood at either end of a long pavilion table and lobbed the ball to and fro trying to get it to drop so near the end that it clipped the edge and fell to the ground eluding the hands of the recipient. This scored a point. It helped if you could spin the ball and Ewart spun it prodigiously. Ben Martin said that he could stand three yards from a billiards table and make a tennis ball spin back to him. With his parents away on their plantation in India, young Michael Cowdrey was to see far more that summer of the man whom he described as ‘almost my uncle and guardian’, for he was to spend most of the holiday with an aunt at Coton a mile and a half south-west of Market Bosworth in Leicestershire and Astill had promised him that he would arrange some games and introduce him to the Leicester players. ‘Every day I would get on the bus and he would pick me up at the bus stop and drive me in his little car to all these things and he introduced me to everybody and he was