EW Swanton - Wisdom From Beyond The Boundary (13 Jan 1997)

13 January 1997

Wisdom from beyond the boundary

SWANTON ON COMPTON: It is well for us to remember when we are watching the best batsmen that, however easy it may all look, they do not achieve their success without toil and sweat and that there are times even with the greatest when they must seem to themselves, as we humble performers so frequently seem to ourselves, to be batting with a broomstick, with a barn door for a wicket.

SWANTON ON BATTING: You might say that balance and timing add up to rhythm, and that is the rhythm which the unsophisticated spectator is appreciating when an especially delicious stroke evokes murmurs of "Lovely, sir, lovely".

SWANTON ON LORD`S: Lord`s is the Mecca of all cricketers and a pilgrimage thereto when they are in London provides a hallowed memory that must sustain the faithful in many a barren outpost.

SWANTON ON GUBBY ALLEN: Perfectionists are not always easy people to live with, and Gubby has always been a perfectionist, whether in the committee room at Lord`s, or on the golf course, rewriting the MCC coaching book, tending his car or his roses, ordering his dinner, or even describing in close anatomical detail his latest strain or his last hip operation.

SWANTON ON BRADMAN: The bat was more of a sabre than a pendulum. But if perfect balance, co-ordination and certainty of execution be accepted as the principal ingredients of batsmanship, we who have watched the Don in his early manhood will not hope or expect to ever to see its art displayed in a higher form.

SWANTON ON A P FREEMAN: There was something grotesque in the way the little gnome of a man came rocking up to the stumps, and flicked one ball after another, all so very nearly the same, and yet so vitally different, until the victim would either commit some act of indiscretion or, more probably, fall to his own timidity.

SWANTON ON GOWER: . . . enthused everyone by his sense of timing and his apparently carefree attitude to the batting art. With his blond, curly hair and juvenile appearance, Gower seemed to step out of the now defunct pages of Boys` Own.

SWANTON ON SONNY RAMADHIN: His little eyes would wrinkle in amusement as his victims groped and prodded.

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