The following exercises may be found very useful for various reasons: Peg-top whipping, some ball-game exerciser (like the patent for Lawn Tennis, but adapted to Cricket), Fencing, Boxing, Bartitsu, Hockey, Golf, Racquets, Tennis, Lawn Tennis, Fives, Squash, hopping and skipping.
These are merely suggestions. Each reader is urged to devise his own means of exercise. Let him work on the lines that Mr. C. B. Fry so admirably lays down in an article in the “Strand.” He says, with reference to his high jumping: “I believe what did me more good than anything else was doing standing jumps regularly, every morning, over a big arm-chair in my room;” and, again: “Although, like most other footballers, I improved in value in some respects after I left school, and became heavier and stronger, I have never since been able to kick as neatly and accurately as I could then. I put this down partly to the constant practice we used to have at school in kicking a football about at odd hours, on a piece of ground called the paddock, and partly to the constant playing of what we called ‘yard football.’ We used to play this game in the asphalt yards attached to our houses, wearing tennis shoes and using an indiarubber ball about a third the size of a football. This game made one very accurate and quick with one’s feet. I have often wished since I could get the same sort of practice.”
Mr. Edward Lyttelton is equally to the point, when he remarks: “The truth must be insisted on; many a cricket match has been won in the bedroom. And even with the ball a good deal may be done. I could name two eminent batsmen who used, as boys, to wait till after the day’s play was over, and the careless crowd had departed, and in the pavilion gave ten minutes or a quarter of an hour to practising a particular style of defence, about which more anon; the one bowled fast sneaks along the floor to the other, at about ten paces distance. This, too, yielded fruit in its time. Like all other great achievements, the getting a score against good bowling is the result of drudgery, patiently, faithfully borne. But the drudgery of cricket is itself a pleasure, and let no young cricketer suppose that he can dispense with it, though some few gifted performers have done great things with apparently little effort.”
Besides the exercises outlined here, each player should certainly use supplementary exercises, especially for the breathing muscles, the abdominal muscles, the erector spinae, and the trapezius. So many of them are needed to correct deformities that I prefer not to offer any samples here. Some system should be chosen which gives exercises graduated according to the individual.[6]
The left side needs to be used in exercises and in games. A few words must be said about this much-neglected half.
The left side probably should not be trained up to the same pitch of excellence and versatility as the right side. Not only are some of the organs on the two sides different (for example, the stomach, liver, and heart), but apparently the supply of blood to the two sides is not equal. On the other hand, our present neglect and consequent atrophy of the left side is scandalously unfair and obviously disastrous in its general results on health and physique. Even for Cricket alone, we require the left side for fielding, and (far more than most people imagine) for batting, especially in forward-play. Moreover, there should be more than one left-hand bowler in each team. Such a bowler’s ball approaches the batsman from an unusual direction and with an unusual break, tending to elicit catches on the off-side. The Americans, led by Professor Tadd, have shown that the left arm can draw and model and do other things practically as well as the right; and the majority of children brought up on Tadd’s principles are nearly ambidextrous.
But how can we become left-handed? Well, apart from left-side exercises, and such forms of sport as Boxing and Fives, we can employ the left hand in opening doors, cutting bread, and so on. Occasionally left-handed games and matches would certainly vary the dulness of a season’s Cricket—and this will apply equally to Lawn Tennis and other games.
But at present we are too truly a stiff-legged people, slow to start; as well as a one-sided people, not masters of our full forces. The reason for mental stupidity and atrophy must be partly physical. Brain-work alone—especially such as we are generally offered as intellectual “education”—is little likely by itself to remove such national faults.
A word may be said in conclusion, with reference not to “educators” but to teachers of Cricket.
While teaching a beginner, let them insist on the essential elements of good play, and give the reason why those elements are essential. Why not flourish the bat? Why not draw the right foot away to the leg-side? The answers to such questions are most helpful, and are very likely to induce a player to correct mistakes when otherwise he might not be convinced that he was radically wrong or know how he was radically wrong.