Latter-Day Coaching In Cricket

Taranaki Daily News, 15 October 1934, Page 11

Latter-Day Coaching In Cricket

METHODS ARE OVER-STANDARDISED

Tp VEN before the Australian cricket team’s tour of England this year there was evidence of dissatisfaction with the average professional'coaching of young players in the Old Country. There was no lessening of recognition of the benefits that young players may gain from intelligent coaching; the dissatisfaction was with the type of coaching given in most instances. The average professional coach tends to perpetuate the kind of game he has played himself, and there are so many stodgy batsmen in county cricket that it is feared that these men will continue to do as so many others have done—teach the rising generation of players an unenterprising form of cricket. The Australian team’s tour has increased that fear, because the team’s slow bowling made many unenterprising county batsmen look simply foolish.

For. a good many years now English batsmen, as a class, have been notoriously ineffective against slow bowlers; the exceptions to that rule have been few in proportion to the number of players in first-class cricket. The exceptions have appreciated the fact that footwork is the foundation of ball games, and they have not had their belief in • its coached out of them. The average professional cricketer in England is either disinclined to take the risk of jumping out to hit a slow ball before if can pitch, or else has had any natural inclination toward enterprise drilled out of" him by other men who should have known better. When his time to coach young players comes he teaches them what he has been taught. The type of coaching, then, continues to be repressive, not an enlargement of natural abilities.

There are some very good coaches in England, but they are so few that there Is obviously sound foundation for the accusation that unimaginative coaching is doing much harm to English cricket. It is informative to read the opinions of some of the great players themselves on the question. “Patsy” Hendren, for example, has become frankly dubious about the benefit of coaching for young players; he thinks that the number of young players who have been spoiled by it is greater than the number of those who have benefited from it. Other prominent players are lukewarm about

the benefits of coaching. When their statements are analysed, however, it is found that they meet on the common ground that too much of the coaching is deadening; they do not decry imaginative and competent coaching.. # # * It is not only in the failure to insist upon the use of the feet in batting, and upon the part that the placing of the feet plays in bowling and fielding, that so many English professional coaches—please note that I am referring only to professional coaches—drive much of the natural ability and enterprise out of promising young players. They are, as a class, given to teaching their pupils “in the lump,” and not with regard for their differences in physique, temperament, and habit of thought. That charge, I have noticed, has also been levelled 1 against some professional coaches in golf in England. The methods of coaching have become overstandardised. * # The growing- dissatisfaction with the average professional coaching in England has some direct interest for New Zealand, because it suggests that New Zealand cricket has not suffered harm from having been unable to have very much coaching from English professionals for several years. Fortunately, several of the English coaches who have been in the Dominion have been of the more enterprising and efficient kind. The trend of events in professional coaching in England should, however, be noted in view of the probability that before long several cricket associations in the Dominion will be desirous of taking up again the coaching of young players. A. L. C.