Herding Cats Page 6

  There are those who struggle in nets, too. I practised for several winters with a terrible cricketer. He could hold a bat and once made a fifty, I’m told. His bowling was unusually bad, however. He made this almost inevitable by choosing the most difficult discipline, leg-spin. Consciously or unconsciously he modelled his action on that of the South African bowler Paul Adams – described as resembling a frog in a blender. But there was method in Adams’s madness: he did take 134 wickets at Test level. Few of my former team-mate’s deliveries even reached the batsman, let alone dismissed him. Like Monty Python’s “Spanish Inquisition”, surprise was his chief weapon. Just occasionally he would produce a good leg-break but more often than not he propelled the ball straight into the side netting. By my calculations, we were spending a tenth of the cost of each session to watch him walk halfway down the net to retrieve his ball. Naturally none of us ever raised this as a problem. If he wanted to master the hardest art in cricket, who were we to stop him? But why were we paying to watch? Plus he made serious practice next to impossible. You need the temperament of a samurai to face a bowler half of whose deliveries are called wide. I captained him a few times and never had the nerve to throw him the ball. Maybe he could have bought me a wicket or two, but I will never know.

  In the nets batsmen need to face proper bowling. Ideally, they would bat in pairs, facing six balls from one bowler, then six from another, changing the strike every so often. The problem is that at our level there is very little proper bowling. Facing an assortment of part-timers is no preparation for any kind of cricket. As your wicketkeeper runs in, you feel none of the apprehension that will envelop you in the first match. Nor will you be surprised – you know exactly what is to come in each case. My team-mates can usually deal with my best balls comfortably, as I can theirs. There is none of that frisson you feel facing a complete stranger.

  But how do bowlers improve? Not by bowling in the nets they don’t. At least not with batsmen there. There is no better thing for a bowler than an hour spent in a net, running in without a batsman to complicate things. You can chart where each delivery goes and try to repeat the one that didn’t work the first time. If your attempted slower ball has been drilled over your head, you need nerve to bowl it again. But on your own you can bowl that ball again and again, until you’ve got it right. Even better to have a coach there to tell you where you’re going wrong and remind you of the basics of bowling. Moeen Ali improved no end as an off-spinner after being told to grip his left hip pocket with his right hand in his follow-through. The best coaching doesn’t remodel your action but makes you aware of its components and the areas in which improvement is possible. But you have to be careful in the advice you take. Some of it will worsen your game.

  At the age of 38 and a half, I had my first ever bowling session with a coach. Hallam Moseley was a fine fast-medium bowler, who played for Barbados and Somerset. He was highly regarded by Gary Sobers and quickly became a crowd favourite at Taunton, where he was loved for his sunny, uncomplicated nature. These days he is a coach at the MCC Indoor School at Lord’s and greets me genially whenever I’m netting there. In our session, Hallam stood there as I ran in for an hour. He quickly identified that my left arm wasn’t doing a great deal and nor was my right wrist. My follow-through also left much to be desired. Not only did he quickly spot my technical deficiencies but he also homed in on my secret fear – of being risibly slow. All three of these modifications would give me, if not that yard of pace, certainly a touch more gas. Enough to frighten a child at least. Speed is something that obsesses the amateur cricketer, much more than it does the pro.

  Those who watch professional cricket don’t always acknowledge the vast chasm between us and them. The batsmen who come on to bowl their dobbers would be faster than anything most of us have faced. Even the keepers can bowl. I remember M. S. Dhoni once removing his pads and bowling some very respectable fast-medium, nearly dismissing Kevin Pietersen lbw. I have been bowled first ball by Dishant Yagnik, the Rajasthan Royals wicketkeeper, as he took a hat-trick against us. Most of our seamers are no faster than an international spinner, often slower, and we don’t turn it a yard, nor possess unerring accuracy and endless variety.

  The introduction of the speed gun in international cricket has given the crowd something else to enjoy. It does not give the amateur cricketer the same pleasure. Most of us overestimate the speed at which we bowl. The former England seamer Ed Giddins turned out for us when we played the national team of Japan. We’d strategically arranged our game on their first day in England on an uncovered pitch in April. If ever there were conditions that would favour us, these were them. Ed arrived with no kit, just his whites and his cricket boots, having not played for a year. His first over was immaculate, every ball beating the Japanese opener outside off stump. When asked afterwards how fast he was bowling, he knew precisely – 72mph he told us – and he was comfortably the quickest on display.

  Practice does have its dangers, however. A former team-mate was unable to resist the temptation of programming an 80mph yorker into the bowling machine he’d installed, “just to see what it was like”. The first delivery broke his foot and he has not been seen near a cricket field since. He now runs instead.

  Is the dressing-room atmosphere conducive to a sharing of problems or insights, or does each jealously guard his ideas from the rest?

  A sport as individualistic as cricket involves a certain amount of conflict within the team and Brearley was not the first or last captain to encounter problems in the dressing-room. There is a hierarchy in everything and it is as pronounced in Sunday cricket as it is in chickens. Someone has to rule the roost and create order beneath them. The concept of a pecking order came from the dissertation published by the Norwegian zoologist Thorlief Schjelderup-Ebbe in 1922. He studied dominance in the hens that he had kept since the age of ten and observed the order in which they fed. This sequence went from the alpha bird all the way down to the weakest. The heavier hens (or those with the largest combs) ate first, while the rest waited their turn. Similar patterns have been observed in other species, from hyenas and wolves to bumblebees. But the chicken is the best comparison for the Sunday cricketer. After all, both walk jerkily around a patch of worn grass, changing direction every so often, and both form similar sized groups – in the wild, chickens live in groups of between ten and 20.

  So to maintain a happy flock the captain needs to look carefully at the team hierarchy. Not only must he address the issues that players have with his captaincy, but he must look at those that they have with each other. After all, many people prefer not to punch upwards and usually the person they will most object to is the one who threatens their position in the team. To put it in zoological terms – only chickens of similar size will fight. And fight they will. A group of 11 is neither small enough for players to feel wholly secure as part of a tight unit, nor is it quite large enough to allow tensions to dissipate easily. Within that group there will be a number of strong friendships and, if you are lucky, they will bind the whole team together. If you’re not, they will push it apart, as players form factions.

  There will never be a situation when every single person in the team likes each other – or even you, the captain. You will find that players’ egos can affect everything, from batting order to refusing to kneel in team photos. There’s often one sunny character who is first to the bar to buy drinks for his team-mates, and who puts the team foremost in how he plays the game. He is the heart of the side and thinks about his team-mates’ game almost as much as he does his own. He might even suggest some useful improvements. At the very least they’ll be well meant. For the rest of us, all too often what we intend as advice comes out as criticism. We implore the bowler who oversteps or bowls wide just to get it right, being unable to spot the technical flaw that has caused the ball to come out as it did. And then there are the rivalries that emerge.

  So, the steady opening batsman will draw attention to the excessive caution shown by the newc
omer at the top of the order – after all, there’s only room for one to play the anchoring role. As opener, he’s been patting unthreatening balls back to the bowler for years, oblivious to the run-rate, while the other batsmen – trying to compensate for his runlessness – come, swipe and go. The anchor has caused the dismissal of his own top order countless times, putting pressure on them to score right from the start, rather than play themselves in. He says he’s blunting the attack and seeing off the new ball. But at drinks he’s still there, dragging the team down with him. He’s been batting like this for years. This fragile ecosystem is threatened by the arrival of another like him. Two anchors will bring the innings to a halt. I’ve seen too many games lost with a pair of defensive batsmen crouching at the crease, like ageing gunslingers waiting for the other to draw.

  Likewise, the erratic spinner who occasionally buys a wicket with his lobs will not look kindly on the arrival of another slow bowler with an economy rate of eight an over. The incumbent gets to bowl because others have kept things sufficiently tight and the captain can afford to give him a short spell when the pressure’s off. But he might not be called upon if there is another like him. Very slow bowlers get wickets because they are so different from the rest of the attack that the batsmen disintegrate mentally. Instead of taking a boundary or two an over off this dreadful bowler, they seek to hit him out of the park every time. Maybe even make him never play cricket again. This approach will often bring about the batsman’s downfall. But it is less likely to work if there are two of these bowlers. Suddenly there is less pressure on the batsmen. They don’t feel the need to cash in so heavily. Even if one of the lobbers comes off, there is still the other to be scored from. Bowling in tandem, these bowlers can lose you the game in just a few overs.

  Moving up the pecking order, there are the larger chickens, in the form of the wicketkeepers. Again, they have a central role but there can only be one of them in the team. Keeping is the hardest role in the game and my experience is that the keepers in your squad stick together. Like goalkeepers in football, they are criticised enough by others to form a bond with their fellow glovemen. And like the drummer in Spinal Tap, few of them seem to last in the role.

  More temperamental are the all-rounders. These are usually stronger players, who perform well with both bat and ball, and expect to do so every game. Having one all-rounder is great and you can even get away with two. Any more than that can cause tension. Suddenly they aren’t as involved as they are used to being. One may take issue when another gets to bat or bowl ahead of him – and no captain likes to give in to demands of this kind.

  In cricket players are reminded constantly of their place in the hierarchy. A bowler who has not been tossed the ball by the halfway mark of the innings can be pretty sure that his captain does not rate him highly. He would much rather be bowling first-change but so would the better bowlers. The ball is hard, the shine is still there and the match is in the balance. By the time the third- or fourth-change bowler is on, the game is usually safe or lost. He is either bowling at a batsman nearing his century, or a tailender, hoping for his first run of the season. There is no chance for him to spin his team to victory. Down in the lower order, things are no better. The non-bowlers wonder if there weren’t better ways of spending the afternoon and there is as much competition as in the top five.

  Captains rarely put as much thought into who bats at nine, ten and 11, but it matters a good deal to them. Our tail usually ends with Tom, who has been coached by Alastair Cook, has hit a six, and yet once finished the season with an average of 0.5. Also lurking down there is our most experienced wicketkeeper. Andrew is nearing 70 and strides to the wicket looking like he’s wearing both teams’ whites, so heavily padded is he. Lastly, there is Jonathan, whose technique, after years of playing hockey, looks more suited to the days when bowlers rolled the ball along the ground at the wicket. All of them would like to bat higher and I would move them up if only I had others to take their place. Somehow you need to make them think their situation is just temporary. You hope it is but the truth is they’ll be batting at nine, ten and 11 next week, too.

  Many cricketers are excellent team-mates while the match is going on but once it’s over they lapse back into petty feuds. End-of-season awards provide plenty of opportunity for this. Winning player of the year puts a target on your back. Brearley’s gift as captain was somehow to make each player feel that his position in the hierarchy was both secure and higher than it looked. With that, his team had no need to peck at each other any more than necessary. The competition between his bowlers he turned to his advantage. Competition in the amateur game is an uglier sight. We try to find that last ounce of performance but the result is as likely to be a beamer or wild slog as the perfect yorker or straight six we’d hoped for.

  You have a private income, don’t you?

  Despite its claims to be the world’s second biggest sport, cricket has a terrible complex when it comes to money. In England it is dwarfed by the financial circus that the Premier League has become. Football has the best of both worlds – access to Sky’s deep pockets and mass participation at grassroots level. No one has ever suggested that the relative absence of football on terrestrial television has hurt the game. In cricket the ECB took Rupert Murdoch’s money and ploughed it into the national team, with the result that for the first time in a generation England fans had something to cheer about. But what good is it to have a world-beating side when so few can watch them? Meanwhile, the ECB looks covetously over to the subcontinent, where cricket rules supreme, money flows into the BCCI’s coffers and where T20 is fast becoming the game’s dominant format.

  The then ECB chairman Giles Clarke clearly hadn’t read Balzac, who implied in Le Père Goriot that behind every great fortune lay a great crime. When Allen Stanford, a man whose own moustache begged you not to trust him, came calling, the ECB greeted him like the second coming. The nadir of this fleeting relationship was the Stanford Super Series – five matches in Antigua with $20 million at stake. In the final T20, in June 2008, the winning team receiving $1 million each, the rest being split among the management, squad players and the England and West Indies cricket boards. Stanford was photographed with the teams, dandled a few of the players’ wives on his knee and grinned with the madness of a man who knows nothing lasts. Eight months later he was charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission with “massive ongoing fraud” and is now in prison, serving a 110-year sentence.

  Further down the cricket ladder, clubs rely on benefactors to support them on the field. There is a long tradition of professionals turning out for league sides and some of the greatest names in cricket have done so. They don’t come cheap. S. F. Barnes, perhaps the best England bowler ever, shunned county cricket for most of his career. He preferred to play in the Lancashire and Bradford leagues, where he could earn more. Today professionals and amateurs still play together, in a role reversal from earlier times. A dressing-room in which some players are paying and others being paid cannot ever be a truly happy place.

  In Sunday cricket benefactors are rarely seen. Sadly the nearest thing to one is usually you. One of the unfortunate side effects of captaincy is that not only does it take up your time and energy but it also can drain your wallet. Unless your day job is a debt collector, you will struggle to get your players to pay every match fee promptly. At least one player will have forgotten his wallet and mutters that he will get you the money during the week. Though once a player did so on the way home from post-match drinks, adding an extra nought to the transfer.

  If you play cricket with people week in, week out, you quickly learn a lot about them. It is the sport that throws you together for longest. Usually this is a source of joy but some things will grate. This captain’s top three gripes are pulling out of matches, timekeeping and money. All three will cause you personally a great deal of trouble but the financial one can affect other relationships in the team. Every team has a player or two who is last to the bar to buy
drinks for others – even the professional game is afflicted by this. In the same way, if you’re lucky you will have a few who make up for this shortfall. We have Tony who invariably opens the innings after the game or net session, buying the first round for team-mates who will not always return the favour. For that, he is forgiven that little bit faster for any lapses in the field.

  Some sports are more expensive to play than others. In cricket you don’t need a fleet of polo ponies, ferried around the world in a special plane. Nor do you need ski lifts to haul you to the top of the slopes, with snow machines for the wrong weather. Nor an immaculately manicured and watered golf course. But our sport isn’t as cheap as we’d like it to be. Grounds require a great deal of upkeep. We’ve all played on pitches where the gentlest delivery can rear up and hit you in the face, where the outfield is arguably as dangerous and where the slip cordon is marked out by a pattern of faecal matter from a dog with no love of the game. To improve on this requires money.

  In London, cricket is, like everything else, that bit more expensive. The average player is usually happy to cough up a tenner for a game. That is meant to cover pitch hire (for us, anything from £80 to £220, the cost of tea (£5–8 a head), a ball or two (£10–15 each) and, if you’re going to be extravagant, the services of an umpire (£25 towards petrol costs). There isn’t a lot of wiggle room here. There certainly isn’t much left over for additional costs like insurance (needed to book certain pitches) and any website that you might have. Some grounds require payment up front and will not reimburse you if the match is called off because of rain. All of these things you learn as you go along. And all of these things lose you money. You bring in an annual sub to be paid at the beginning of the season to cover these.