The practice of part-by-part should be encouraged, Mr. Edward Lyttelton’s hints about bedroom exercise being constantly borne in mind. The movements should be explained and illustrated and performed by the teacher not only as complex wholes but also as simple parts. The teacher should say, for example, “Watch my left foot while I play forward. No; stand behind me, and watch its line. Now watch my left elbow.” He should at first work slowly. Comparisons and contrasts are among the best of helps. Compare cutting to peg-top whipping; compare the left-foot lunge to the fencing lunge; contrast the alertness of the fielder and (if he have Abel’s activity) of the batsman with the fixed “stance” of the golfer, whose eye must not follow the ball’s flight at once.
Let the teacher urge the beginner to correct his faults by exaggerating in the opposite direction: if the batsman’s right leg inclines to bend itself, let it be kept rigidly stiff, ridiculously straight.
Individuality must not be crushed. But it must not be fostered unless the player already has the necessary mechanisms of the various parts of play—batting and bowling—under control. The player must not hope to form his style out of a stock-in-trade consisting of less than half the muscular elements which practically every successful player possesses. The genius-player may safely be left to move along his own lines, with occasional supervision. The duffer-player, like myself, must not be left to do so; first he must learn to use those muscles, and especially those large muscles, which the best players use—for example, in forward-play, the full extension of right leg and left wrist. Then, if I may repeat the old metaphor, having mastered the spelling and the vocabulary, let him at length write his own writing; having collected the bricks and mortar and wood, let him at length build his own building.
CHAPTER IX.
FALLACIES OF THEORISTS AND OTHERS.
It is safe to presume that every reader has read some one or more of the many writings on Cricket (from a penny upwards); that he has seen many good matches and many great amateur as well as professional experts; that he has batted often, fielded often, bowled at least once. So there need be no explanation of the game and its divisions; the reader already knows pretty shrewdly the chief merits of batting, fielding, and bowling, at least when he sees these merits. He rather needs to have fallacies exposed and faults explained. This chapter will clear the ground of rubbish after we have begun to sow advice upon it; the ground must be cleared, even if it be necessary to pull down some old ruins surviving from fifty years ago.
The first fallacy is about games in general, and about Cricket in particular as the grandest of them all. And here we must distinguish what our games are to some few, from what they can and should be to many if not to all. We shall claim much for them as the British nation claims much for itself—on the strength of its best examples, without imagining that the full advantages are universally, or even generally, realised. For the fallacy of many good players, that Cricket actually is all that can be claimed for ideal Cricket, rather than that it might and should be all this, is no less ridiculous. If, for example, the fielder stands careless and listless, Cricket becomes for him almost an exercise in non-promptitude! The ball runs to the side of him, his lazy flop towards it is almost an exercise in non-extension as well. We must guard against all extreme statements as to what cricket is. It certainly is not an end in itself. Even all-round success in it is not an end in itself; still less is success in some one branch only. But it is as well for all who play Cricket to remind themselves if not of the ideal yet of what is higher than their present actual.
Cricket is not merely a muscle-maker, a sort of gymnastic drill which scarcely trains the nerves at all. To run out to a ball, to stand up to a fast bowler and not draw away the right foot, to field a hard drive, this means nerve. Nor is Cricket merely a physical health-maker or disease-palliator. To have practised and played it properly is quite impossible without some mental and moral exercise and health as well; it is a social game of the best kind—it is a great bond of union. Far above brainless frivolity, farther above mere recreation, it can be a preparation for the whole of life, even for business life; for it can teach co-operation, specialisation, patience, observation, promptness, full extension, use of great weight and power without loss of poise. It can be valuable for all life, which mere muscle-straining without nerve-training, mere disease-avoidance, mere amusement, cannot possibly be.
There are those who would not deny to Cricket some of these many merits, but they would say that Cricket can only be played properly by born players, that no others can ever play it well. To fielding this certainly does not apply: fielders can be trained; so can batsmen, up to a certain point; so—for all we know—can bowlers. I do not mean by the present absence of method, but by the use of sensible methods.
For the common advice of the genius-players who are so often set to teach the game is little likely to make cricketers. “Play in a natural way,” they say. This advice must be exposed, though it is insisted upon by some of the leading authorities. For Cricket is not a natural game. As Ranjitsinhji aptly says, the natural tendency is to hit up and to pull to the on. In playing forward one does not naturally keep the bat straight and with its handle nearer to the bowler than its bottom is; one does not naturally keep the right foot still, send the left elbow forward, and the bat near to the left foot. The instinct is against all this—for example, to keep the striking implement well away from one’s body, as at Golf, Lawn Tennis, Tennis, Racquets, Squash, Fives, Hockey, and so on. Conversely, Mr. Lacey, the Secretary of the M.C.C., after having the Cricket-habit ingrained in him, found it hard at Tennis to get far enough away from the ball. And how can bowling be considered “natural” for him whose fingers and back-muscles are practically undeveloped? So our answer to the teacher who would say, “Choose the natural way of batting, or of bowling, or of fielding,” is that this may be well enough if you already have control of the different parts of your batting, or bowling, or fielding mechanism; but that otherwise (and the chances otherwise are at least ten to one), the undeveloped muscles will probably be unused; the work will be thrown on other muscles, and will be done either badly or with excessive effort. We should prefer to say this: “Get control of the various muscles, as by the fast full-movement[7] system; then get the foundations of play—the right foot as pivot, the left leg as straight lunger (for forward strokes), the straight bat with left elbow well forward, the habit of the eye on the ball, and so on; then, if you like, by all means try different ways and styles, and choose what is natural to you; but—unless you are a prodigy—do not be natural prematurely, or you will almost surely form bad habits.”
That practice of this kind or indeed any sort of training will not be worth while, is a fallacy that has been exposed at the beginning of the chapter on Training. Even if Cricket led to nothing at all, training would still be as useful as most things that we attend to. But Cricket can make one fitter for all-round activity, and proper practice and training must make one fitter for Cricket—fitter in skill, fitter in endurance, fitter in every way.