Children’s Games Are Not Child’s Play
Not too long ago, I discovered that a young relative of mine was being taught two cricket strokes by his ‘coach’: the sweep and the reverse sweep. He’s nine years old. He hasn’t got a grip on how to grip a bat. His wrists push the bat-face upwards, he leads with the bottom hand, and he cannot as yet swing it in an arc that doesn’t twist and turn according to the momentum of an uncontrolled swing of a body that hasn’t the balance that is, alas, a matter of discipline and training and doesn’t necessarily come spontaneously.
He doesn’t know what ‘playing in the arc’ is, and hasn’t ever seen a ‘V’-net. When he bowls, he has a tendency to chuck, and his coach believes that children should be just encouraged to play, so no one thought of the trick that was used to get beginners or refugees from baseball to stop bending the elbow: bowl a football, because you can’t grip it to throw. Isn’t it dangerous to play a sweep before you can be confident of hitting the ball with a straight bat?
When two or three friends got together to play, a ball hit in the air, no matter where, was considered out. A more sophisticated version of these reduced-player games might include setting a notional field to a batsman so that he knew where the close-in fielders were; but that was only for the little mishits, a few inches off the ground. If you hit a ball in the air to silly point, and the bowler had already told you there was a fielder there, you were out.
Oh no, I was told, they’re not playing with hard balls yet. In which case, wouldn’t it be better not to encourage them to imagine that swiping across the line of the ball before you’ve learned how to control a bat to hit the ball straight and consistently is a good thing? Because when a hard ball enters the game, he’s in for an unpleasant surprise.
What? I hear voices say. What on earth are you talking about? Some of the readers of this set of reflections might not find these comments entirely unintelligible. And why does this have anything to do with England losing an Ashes Test in two days, the deaths of Phil Hughes ten years ago and 17-year-old Ben Austin a few days ago, or bouncy rubber-ball cricket on concrete squares? Perhaps this bears some explanation.
There are some sports that, while never being classified as ‘extreme’, are, without proper training, potentially dangerous. A certain amount of training has gone into learning how to play them. This is the one thing that makes ‘technique’ still relevant, in an era when we’re told ‘the game has changed so much’, and are given to understand that everyone has their own ‘individual style’: cricket for a neo-liberal and more consumerist age where everyone has agency.
And while it’s perfectly possible to believe that not everyone’s stance, balance, starting positions, or preferred strokes can be taught in exactly the same way, a few guidelines on acceptable variations in technique will last much longer than one’s hand-eye coordination – which, let’s face it, works as a layer on top of the learned discipline of a sport.
One of those technical instructions was to keep your eye on the ball. This meant, of course, that one did not duck under a short ball; one got inside or outside the line of it and let it pass you. If you ducked, it was with the ball still in your vision. If you hooked, you got inside the line of the ball. You certainly didn’t trust the bounce, which on the best-prepared of wickets that only the professionals had access to could always vary; or your helmet to protect you if you missed: there weren’t any.
There was very little protection offered by umpires to frontline batsmen: the bowler could bowl as many bouncers as he liked, and even slip in the occasional beamer without being banned from bowling for the rest of the innings.
It was a matter of life and death. And, as we have seen, it still is. With Michael Holding bowling very fast to Brian Close, who was then over forty years old, in the 1976 series, you can still see from the footage how Close moved his head away from a bouncer at the very last moment: it looks close to murderous, but it didn’t look as if he ever had his eyes off the ball, as a consequence of which he managed to protect his head.
Contrast this with the very best batters of later generations: Rahul Dravid got hit on the head – more precisely on the helmet – several times, as did Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting, or any of the other greats.
The pre-helmet generation often, when they did fail to get their heads out of the way of the ball, got severely hurt – Nari Contractor’s cracked skull being a case in point – but perhaps because of that, had to rely more on technique and survival skills (and umpires were empowered to protect the less skilled from injury).
Two related issues, obviously, are visibility (you see less clearly with a proper helmet on, through a visor that doesn’t let a ball through, and with sides that act as blinkers) and a sense of invulnerability. The latter is more dangerous: the more modern your protective equipment, the more you feel you can’t get hurt, and the more likely you are to do something silly.
And yet, it is the silly things that you’re repeatedly called upon to do in the shorter and ever-shortening forms of the game. So much so that there is a mistaken understanding that you can start children off in cricket by teaching them the silly things first.
That’s fine, as long as the ball is soft and doesn’t hurt, although why that qualifies as playing cricket, I don’t know. Then the ball gets harder, and if you’ve been playing children’s games for a longish time, you have no idea what to do. Protection, of course, gets better and compulsory. But by this time a child’s muscle memory contains all the bad habits that are impossible to get rid of.
Also Read: The Narrow Grain: A Cricketing Experience Of An Academician
Contrast all of this to how we learned the game in the 1970s, also with bouncy rubber balls, or if we were lucky, heavy tennis-ball imitations that could, in a formal street game, be dipped in water every so many overs to give the illusion of a new ball (a wet ball sped quicker off the tarmac). Most importantly, the bouncier balls were still expected to be kept down.
Two instances of a ball hit in the air, leaving the road, and landing without bouncing in someone’s house and you were out: umpires would remind batsmen (a category which in our time included a few women) at the beginning of the over that they were already ‘half-out’, so should keep the ball down.
That it was the umpires who did this was logical, because everyone was playing, and it was only the batting team that could spare people to take on the job of umpires when they were out or low down in the batting order. Home umpires, then, would take on this job. What was clear was that cricket was a game played with the ball, as far as possible, on the ground. Not in the air.
When two or three friends got together to play, a ball hit in the air, no matter where, was considered out. A more sophisticated version of these reduced-player games might include setting a notional field to a batsman so that he knew where the close-in fielders were; but that was only for the little mishits, a few inches off the ground. If you hit a ball in the air to silly point, and the bowler had already told you there was a fielder there, you were out.
A version of this game was once upon a time played on the Presidency College, Calcutta basketball court, with a hard tennis ball. Two runs if you got it through the fielders along the ground and off the court, square or behind; four if you hit it straight: but if you hit it out of the court without it bouncing in the court, you were out. (A useful side-effect of this form of the game is that we seldom dealt with lost balls, which wasn’t such a bad thing for students perpetually short of money).
What, I wonder, would any player active today think of these games, when bats are built for elevation and power, and ‘soft hands’ is an impossibly antiquated expression, which the bat you use works against? Add to that the fact that an amateur cricketer will at most get to play a 30-over game, which counts as a ‘long’ game, and we are killing a great and miraculous game. Defence, concentration, survival, patience, technique, temperament, all die with it.
Cover Image: Roboflow Universe
Benjamin Zachariah works at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, and with the project on the contemporary history of historiography at the University of Trier. He was trained in the discipline of history in the last decade of the previous century. After an uneventful beginning to a perfectly normal academic career, he began to take an interest in the importance of history outside the circle of professional historians, and the destruction of the profession by the profession. He is interested in the writing and teaching of history and the place of history in the public domain.
