Chappell warns of regimented cricket

Greg Chappell has warned of a regimented approach taking hold of cricket and stifling natural instinct. He identified scientists and academics with little playing experience as a threat, and said that strong-minded people with a sense of the game could counter it.

Describing them in gangland terms, Chappell said they were a "mafia" that had complicated training and squeezed players' enjoyment and understanding of the game, according to the Trinidad & Tobago Express. He said he felt that the world was following the Australian way, but didn't realise that the present players had reached the national team because of older systems.

"These new methods are not the methods that got us to where we are," Chappell said. "They have come in subsequent to the development of most of the players in the present Australian team." He highlighted the Australian Academy as a case in point. "I worked in my last few years with South Australia with the first generation who have come through this new system and they're lost. They don't understand the game, they don't have an intrinsic love for it because they've never been emotionally involved. They don't watch any cricket, they don't know where the game has come from and they are confused."

What they needed, Chappell believed, was a firm guiding hand, an ability to broaden their horizons, and play positively. That's what the great West Indians had in common. "Garry Sobers, Viv Richards, Dessie Haynes, all your great players, didn't know what made them play the cover-drive or the hook the way they did, but could they ever play them!" said Chappell. "To try to explain to them the biomechanics of it all would just confuse them. The more structure you get at an early age, the more it messes you up."

Chappell suggested that the monotonous regularity of a bowling machine could not prepare batsmen for a match situation, where bowlers had different ball-release times, and were sometimes, in the case of Wes Hall - and Paul Adams of more recent vintage - a flurry of movements. "When Wes Hall was bowling, all arms and legs, the important part of batting was to time your movements with his movements. You don't get that with a bowling machine. Bowling machines don't replicate what a bowler does."

Chappell said that changing times had brought new methods, and though he wasn't one for sticking to the past, to dismiss old methods as outdated was missing the point. "Society has changed and the game has changed with it. We can't go backwards and I don't propose that we do.

"But we've got to look at the things that made us great, not reject them out of hand and replace them with new approaches like biomechanics that are not yet proven to be workable and that, in other sports like swimming and athletics, have been tried and discarded."