A touch of nostalgia puts focus on present (25 July 1999)

25 July 1999

A touch of nostalgia puts focus on present

Tony Lewis

Nostalgia usually wins in conversation pieces at Lord's and it is part of the enjoyment. Sir Jack Hayward, of Wolverhampton Wanderers and Bahamas fame, whose patronage made possible the building of MCC's indoor cricket school, first took us back to 1942 when he reported as a teenager to his Royal Air Force reception unit, which was Lord's.

He was kitted out in a building in Baker Street, he washed and exercised in the Seymour Baths and ate his meals at the Regent's Park zoo restaurant. He did a 48-hour guard of the cricket ground before being drafted to Florida, where he won his pilot's wings.

And that started us talking about Services' end-of-war cricket at Lord's when Sgt Compton, fresh from the Holkar state, might be expected to salute Flt-Lt Edrich. I am sure Compo never quite got his arm up but MCC and Middlesex quickly abandoned the amateurs' dressing room and separate gate to the field.

Mention of Edrich and Compton had Frank Tyson recalling his bouncer which fractured Edrich's jaw: Northamptonshire against Middlesex at Lord's. He was a fearsome pace. He remembered: "It was the following day that Compton came in to bat. I raced in, but when I was almost at the stumps I saw Compton walking down the pitch towards me. Soon he had flipped me into the stand at square leg."

And the rope. Some commentators on this Test have complained that the outfield at the Nursery End has been shrunk by the moving in of the boundary rope by 20 yards. In fact, the boundary rope has been there for many years, 20 yards in, so that the covers can be lodged on the grass behind. In any case, the old 'uns recalled, in the days of great crowds at Lord's there were about 7,000 spectators sitting on the grass.

I talked about the 'enjoyment' of cricket because I had recently heard an interview on Radio Essex with the old Essex opening bat T C 'Dickie' Dodds. Dickie, having spent six years in the Second World War, mostly in Burma, appeared to play every stroke of his 380 first-class matches as a continuous celebration of being alive. He hit the ball hard and enjoyed it.

He said of today's players: "I ask everyone why they play cricket. I want them to say 'for enjoyment', but few do. If they say 'for the money' I assure them that the cash motivation has a bad effect on their game.

"But coaching, too, has been the ruination of our batting. I was connected with a fine public school in which they had the best equipment, the finest nets, perfect facilities for play; but why did they not produce an England player? In fact most of them gave up at 15. The truth is, they taught cricket at that school like they taught arithmetic. After every ball the advice was 'no, not like that'. They were being corrected in technique. That is useless. I do not want to see two teams play against each other in technique. I want to see them play a game of cricket.

"I used to ask the boys what they loved about cricket, and if they said they liked swiping the ball for six then I would say 'go on then, go out and do some swiping'. That is how West Indians used to learn. Big strokes came first: defence was just a rejection of the ball."

Would Dickie have been a brilliant one-day player? "One-day cricket," he proclaimed rather sternly, "only came into being to force first-class batsmen to play in a way which was necessary to win three-day games and entertain: we needed natural play in our County Championship. But one-day cricket is only a horse race: artistry is not part of it. It is just an accountants' day out."

To move the conversations forward to only 10 years ago, it was Ian Botham who said about talent: "You've got to enjoy it. Let it go. Let it speak for itself. Let it take you over. You've got to set it free and not get in its way." Everyone nodded. And the conclusion? We need great teachers of the very young, not an army of coaches for 25-year-olds. Someone to inspire; to make small boys dream. Someone, As Dickie Dodds suggests, to demonstrate the enjoyment.

How to release an unbridled Shoaib Akhtar into England cricket or the mischief of Shane Warne or the shocking assaults of Sanath Jayasuriya - that is the challenge which can only be attacked at the grass roots by cricket evangelists. We all drank to that.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)