Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

the boy who desires to excel should more carefully train himself. . . . The player of beyond average skill has been in all times a great back player.’ King clearly learned to play off the back foot with consummate skill and grammatical correctness in defence as well as in attack, in the former becoming adept especially in defending against fast-rising balls on crumbled, sticky and also just slow wickets. Whether his cuts, for which he was famous, were made by a forward or lateral movement of his front leg or a back or lateral movement of his back leg I can, unfortunately, find no evidence to show, nor whether he employed the so-called ‘forward cut’, which Fry classifies rather as a square off-drive, forcing back stroke or ‘a species of slash’. Newspaper reports, unfortunately, regularly refer simply to ‘cuts’ and ‘cutting’; but one already in 1901 mentions his late-cut at which he became very proficient. The photographs of him batting and especially the first of him bowling show exceptionally muscular forearms which, combined, with his powerful wrists enabled him to make firm cuts which frequently were kept low, although on occasion were lofted, once even for six, an event far less common then than with the heavier bats in the tumultuous and at times Bedlamite exuberance of modern one-day cricket. Even though no longer in King’s time was a ball to the leg deemed the delivery of a cad or incompetent and worthy of an apology from the perpetrator, yet the ‘Golden Age’ showed a distinct preference for the off-side; and King, as we have seen, was an adept at off-side strokes. Notwithstanding, he soon developed leg-side strokes: indeed, one South African newspaper, in introducing him to its readership in 1905, writes, ‘He bats left-handed, and like most of his Benjamite brethren, is terribly strong on the leg side’. A later report notes that ‘his leg strokes [were] forceful and very neatly timed’. In addition to strong on-driving we may note that in the first decade of the century, when he was at his full strength and still with very swift reactions, he could hook with great power; and the stroke is still mentioned in reports of his batting in 1925. He employed also the pull or pulled drive, which the archetypical flouter of conventions Edward Mills Grace, with his marvellous eye-and-wrist co-ordination, had perfected but Fry considered a dangerous stroke, and which Ranjitsinhji claimed ‘should be’ only ‘a manner of dealing with a very easy ball, or a ball that had been made very easy by the batsman’s judgment’. Certainly on the uncovered wickets of ‘The Coroner’s’ day such a cross-batted stroke was usually to be Technique and Style 35