Lives in Cricket No 52 - Schooled in Cricket (2nd edition)

165 at his peak for ten years, then Johnny saw the development of four cricket generations of players – and yet another generation of emerging players! Rothwell in particular became a revered centre of Yorkshire cricket in some ways more central than Headingley. Herbert Sutcliffe paid Johnny Lawrence to coach his son Billy. Almost certainly Billy learned most from his father who was an all-time great batsman and Johnny’s role may have been to maintain his progress through encouragement and providing him with a platform for his practice. Also in the late 1940s we have Miles Coope and Desmond Barrick frequenting the school. Established players including star Test players such as Johnny Wardle in the 1940s (before the days when he had a school of his own) and later Bob Appleyard when he was recovering fitness after being laid low with tuberculosis as well as county players such as Vic Wilson would practise there during the winter – especially when the season was approaching. I have also been told that the great Jim Laker, as a young yet-to-emerge bowler, attended the school, though we have no knowledge of Johnny coaching him. As for the younger players, Bryon Roberts, who attended Johnny’s nets in the early 1950s, told me “he treated us boys like family and sought to maximise our cricketing opportunities whenever possible”. He commanded in a gentle way the respect of the attenders. Roberts for example remembers no foul language ever heard in the nets and certainly no dirty stories. Players who have gone on to coach like Jack Birkenshaw and Peter Stringer, as well as another good player Ashley Metcalfe, have told me that Johnny, in word and deed, always coached natural ability. This was his almost simple creed and at the same time the secret of his genius. It is easy with the pressures of top professional cricket for players to deviate from what had been natural and to lose out in their performances, but it is interesting that when this ever happened to that great perfectionist, Geoffrey Boycott, he would go back to his mentor – to find out A coach and those he influenced