Too many people tend to criticise unorthodox players for what they don’t do, rather than celebrate them for what they can do
“A coach,” the batsman said, “must be careful not to cramp a lad’s style, not to repress his individuality.” His voice was soft, and he spoke English with an inflection that betrayed the fact he had been born and raised abroad. “One boy may show signs of steadiness, another of hard-hitting, another may have a tendency towards fast-scoring methods. A good coach will develop each player along natural lines.” The audience listened in appreciative silence, appropriate for a man of his skills and standing.
There had been controversy when he was first selected for England, but he had quietened it when, in his first series, he scored that brilliant 150 in the fourth innings against Australia. Now, most accepted that he was the best batsman in the country. Or at least the most brilliant, capable of incredible shots of his own design, the likes of which other, more orthodox, more English, batsmen, scarcely imagined, much less attempted. He continued. “If a young player showed a particular knack for a dangerous stroke, then he shouldn’t be discouraged from playing it, far less forced to abandon it. But he should be shown how to make it safer.” He spoke in particular of the pull, and the hook, which he had used so wonderfully well against the Australian quicks.
There were mutters of disagreement at that. And if the murmurers were too polite to raise their voices, they were gratified to read a rebuttal of his words in The Times the next day. “His play, as everyone who has seen him knows, is not English play,” the paper said. The pull and the hook, the paper advised, “are dangerous eccentricities which should not be recommended to the young.” Furthermore, “a lad may excuse himself for ending a pentameter verse with an adjective by the plea that Ovid sometimes does the same, and the master’s well-known answer is ‘when you have written as many and as good verses as Ovid, you may imitate him in breaking the rules.’ A cricket coach should in our opinion say much the same to a boy who tried to pull an off-ball or hook a straight one.”
Which is the giveaway, if you hadn’t yet twigged, that this conversation took place a long time ago; 117 years back, to be exact, when Ranjitsinhji published his Jubilee Book of Cricket. But it echoed again this week. Among the many little insights included in Kevin Pietersen’s debut column in the Daily Telegraph were a couple of snippets about the academy he is planning to open in Dubai. These were, presumably, included at his behest, part of the voracious PR campaign being waged by his management team, but they still contained a few pithy observations about English cricket.
“My guiding principles are that I want to coach kids the way they play and not from a textbook. You want kids to grow up believing in their own natural talent and strengths,” Pietersen explained. “I have seen how coaching is now, especially for kids. Ball on a cone, high elbow and hit through the ball. In my opinion that is not the only way to coach and it’s holding back some natural talent. The game has changed and coaching has to change too.”
The comparison he made was with Lasith Malinga. “How the hell does he get wickets bowling like that? But his technique works for him. If he was a young England player he would probably have drifted out of the game.” Which is not such a piece of what-iffery as it first appears. Perhaps the last really unorthodox English bowler to appear on the county circuit, the off-spinner Maurice Holmes, is now playing for Cannock in Division Three of the Birmingham Premier League, far away from the county scene.
“There will always be the English view, that something different is not necessarily something good,” Holmes told me in 2012. “There are people who tend to take the traditional view that things can and should only be done in one way.” He too has his forebears. Bernard Bosanquet, who perfected the googly, said that his delivery had been “subject to ridicule, abuse, contempt, and incredulity” in its early years. When he bowled the great Arthur Shrewsbury with one, the batsman told him the delivery was “unfair”. “Not unfair, Arthur,” Bosanquet said with a grin, “only immoral.”
Curiously, Kumar Sangakkara has also compared Pietersen to Malinga, telling Wisden Extra: “For us, it’s been like that with Lasith Malinga. He is very different in the way he looks, and as a person. Not everyone gets on well with each other in a team. There are certain people you might not have dinner with, but that doesn’t take away from the fact they will be valuable players in a national cause, going out trying to win matches.” Sri Lanka, of course, have done a far better job of nurturing, and integrating, players with unorthodox techniques, from Malinga to Murali to Ajantha Mendis, even Sanath Jayasuriya.
Too many people in English cricket tend to criticise unorthodox players for what they don’t do, rather than celebrate them for what they can do. Hence the recent fuss about Saeed Ajmal’s action, though the rest of the world has long since accepted him. Some seem to think that anyone who bowls with a bent elbow is a villain, regardless of whether or not they straighten it, and even though we now know that all bowlers flex their arms, which is why we have the 15 degree rule. But then, on these shores even traditional leg-spin still seems to be an unfathomable and alien skill.
The question of English approach towards unorthodox talent is growing more pressing. The current generation is the first to have grown up playing, and watching, T20, a format that encourages an irregular, even radical, approach. And yet we seem reluctant to embrace our most luminous talents. Alex Hales is, incredibly, unable to get into the ODI side. We dither about whether Jos Buttler’s wicket-keeping is up to snuff, worry whether Eoin Morgan has issues with his defence outside off-stump. Moeen Ali is yet to even use the doosra, which he says he has learned, in a match.
Not all young players have the bullet-proof self-belief that enabled Pietersen to overcome the doubts, the disapproval, and forge his own way ahead. They need to be fostered, supported, by those around them. But Buttler, for instance, even seems to have swallowed the idea that he’s not yet good enough to play Test cricket. As Pietersen says, “the game has changed”, but have our attitudes?
