Extract 7

Junior Sport: Musings on Propriety and Relative Efficacy in Language and Batting Technique, Ample Alliteration in Onomastic Descriptions of Notable Cricket Players, and a Pointless Graph:

I think it was probably towards the end of year 1 that I started playing “Kanga” cricket. My dad had signed me up for the programme at the same club I played soccer at, Kissing Point. I remember Kanga cricket was a highly informal thing. We would all go to this field called the Glade in Wahroonga, not too far away from our house, and then for two hours do a whole series of drills and exercises, culminating in a game of “Diamond cricket”. Richard Jones was the coach, the father of a boy from Warrawee with (undiagnosed) narcissistic personality disorder named Ryan. I remember Richard taught us to bowl by analogising the motion of the arms to the action of a windmill, and the rapid drop of the left arm as the right arm came over (or vice versa in devil spawn) to the image of “yanking a chain”. This was a pretty handy pair of metaphors, and most people picked the basic skill up relatively easily, I think (though variation in skill emerged quickly, as it always does with sport). I can’t remember who was the best bowler now, although I think I wasn’t too bad.

Learning to bat with “proper technique” was possibly even harder than learning to bowl, despite one’s intuitive sense that whacking a ball must be a more natural skill than learning to throw in a very peculiar way without bending your arm. It is, of course, true that whacking a ball is a more natural skill than learning to bowl, but one of the many strange things about cricket is that batting with “proper technique” is not even remotely close to whacking a ball, and doesn’t in the least resemble the style of batting common in baseball. Instead, “proper technique” in batting is a bit like “Received Pronunciation” in English locution. Both of them are the traditional, aristocratic, Etonian, Oxbridgian way of doing things; they both seem more proper and decorous than other styles; they’re both very hard to learn without training; and they both generally work, though there’s scant evidence that they’re more efficient ways of doing things than any others. Just as Cambridge English involves a speech impediment on Rs so that you’re differentiated from the common folk, proper batting technique requires you to hold your elbow up in a very uncomfortable and mechanically inefficient pose so that your default shots are always “straight”. Just as Received Pronunciation makes you sound very starchy and priggish, proper batting technique requires that you stand perfectly perpendicular to the bowler and keep absolutely still – a very poncy pose. And just as the Oxbridge culture makes allowances for outbursts of ribaldry and vulgarity on specific festive occasions, proper technique permits you to play more base and loose shots like “cuts”, “pulls”, “hooks” and “hoiks”, but only in certain circumscribed circumstances, like when the delivery is exceedingly “short” and you’ve already “got yourself in”.

Naturally, all of this sits in stark contrast to the instinctive way of batting for all kids, so one does have to be thoroughly drilled for the style to become even mildly comfortable. The consequence of this is that a lot of kids either forever reject the “corrective” instruction, or just never quite master the technique. In Kanga cricket, I think it was probably only a couple of kids who were getting the hang of it by the end of the season.

Personally, I have a hunch that what I intimated before about “proper technique” – namely, that it is no more efficient than any other method – might actually be more correct than most pundits realise. Indeed, what you find in the junior ranks of cricket is that the best athletes almost always find a way to succeed, no matter their technique. The only exception is when they are caught between the two worlds and are being forced to repress their natural instincts, like a Geordie in an elocution class. The important point is that there are definitely ways to succeed on hand-eye co-ordination alone, without all the trappings of the formal style. The traditionalists claim that it’s only in junior levels that the proper technique is unnecessary, since the slow and erratic bowling isn’t sufficient to expose deep flaws. However, there is ample evidence from all levels that proper technique isn’t necessary. Despite widespread inculcation into the proper technique, there have been plenty of truly great players at the highest levels with so-called “rubbish” techniques and yet more with “mediocre” ones. W.G. Grace’s graceless style looks nothing like today’s, Don Bradman had a strange and highly unorthodox method, Keith Miller was a flamboyant flayer, Garfield Sobers was a dashing slasher, Doug Walters was a maverick whacker, Viv Richards was a reckless wrecker, Allan Border was a dogged dragger, and in the modern era we can name countless great tonkers, hoikers, bashers, hackers, pounders, swingers, crabs and barnacles. Just to name a few, there’s the brilliant Brian Lara, the violent Virender Sehwag, the macho Matthew Hayden, the aggressive Adam Gilchrist, the callous Jacques Kallis, the shadowy Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the artful A.B. de Villiers, the dastardly David Warner and the vicious Virat Kohli. All the best T20 specialists obviously conform to the noncomforist category too. To name a few of these, there’s the masterful M.S. Dhoni, the eukinetic Yuvraj Singh, the catastrophic Chris Gayle, the cantankerous Kieron Pollard, the obstreperous Eoin Morgan, the showy Shaun Marsh and the shocking Shane Watson. Although test cricket is still regarded as the ultimate test of quality, it remains true that these batsmen are efficient in at least one form of the game – and that’s what matters when trying to distinguish between two methods.

Clearly, the proper technique has produced numerous great players, including in the modern era. Sachin Tendulkar had a model style, for example, and he even used it to score very fast (albeit with a massive bat). Moreover, England’s few great batsmen have all tended to use the proper technique (the world’s slowest and stodgiest batsman, Geoffrey Boycott, always adopted it, as does Alistair Cooke). Nevertheless, I still think it is evident that it’s overrated.

That was a long digression!      

Before I did Kanga, I don’t think I knew anything about cricket, and never watched the Australian team. After it, though, I was much more favourably disposed to the sport. And once you mastered the basics of the Kanga game, it really did become terrific fun to play. People say you spend most of the time in cricket just standing around like a scarecrow, twiddling your thumbs, twirling your hair, snapping your trousers – in short, frittering away the time and waiting for something to happen. Although this has a (very) significant element of truth to it, one of the great strengths of the sport at the egalitarian junior levels is that, in one single game, you will get to perform four distinct roles, each requiring its own set of unique skills. How exciting is that! Moreover, this diversity of opportunity essentially gives you four chances to succeed, alleviating any frustration you might feel after a failure at one role. After getting bowled first ball (known as getting a “golden duck”), you can merely shrug it off and say, “Perhaps I’ll succeed as wiki” (meaning “wicket keeper”). What a jolly sport! Top hole, what.

Now that I’m on the subject of sport, I suppose I should discharge a brief summary of my second season of soccer. During the 2003 season, I was in the 6Bs at Kissing Point, an upgrade from the year before (but in the same age division, because I was underaged and not brilliant). From memory, this season was much more enjoyable than my first, and I began to make some friends in it. Most of the team was made up of kids from Turramurra Public School, but I think Ryan Jones (the boy aforementioned) was also in it, and maybe someone else from Warrawee I can’t remember. I think I can accurately recall a few other people from the team, but I don’t think it’s worth listing their names.

Since I had already played a full season of soccer, I now felt much more accomplished and confident, and had a head-start on dribbling and the other important skills of the game. Indeed, if I’m not mistaken, one of the clearest memories I have of training in the dark at Auluba Oval comes from this season. We had been instructed to dribble to a fence and back as a warm-up and exhorted to use “both our feet” while doing so. I remember finding it very easy to fulfil this prescription of ambidexterity, and that gave me great pleasure.

It was probably this season that I discovered which positions I was best at, namely, left and right midfield. These were suited to me because I had a lot of natural stamina – I could run up and down the field all day – and I was pretty good at passing, but not that good at beating players with fancy dribbling, heading or booting the ball out from the back, or throwing myself into scary one-on-one clashes. Basically, my strength was as a kind of fit utility player, and this hasn’t really changed since then.

In this second season of soccer, I think we were a fairly good team, and this was one of the reasons why I found it so much more enjoyable than the first. We were so good, in fact, that on the Gala Day (the last, action-packed day of the season where the winner takes all (there are no league tables at lower age-divisions)), we actually won! Yes, we fucking won the competition. Admittedly, we didn’t win “Div 1”, because we were still a B team, but we were victors nonetheless. I still have my green Gala day medal from this year, along with all my other trophies.

Incidentally, now that we’re on the subject of trophies, I feel it’s a good time to mention a curious quirk of my trophy collection: the very first trophy I ever received, at the end of the under-6 Cs season, is far bigger than any of the others. At the time, I remember being so happy when that whopping great monument was bestowed upon me. It was just such a marvellous artefact, and I used to spend minutes on end just staring at the faux-metal homunculus, gazing in awe at his exemplary physique and pose, his magnificent grace and poise, and revelling in fantasies of my similarity to this man. Notably, when I compared this first trophy to the others, I remember also that I used to lament the increasing meanness of the club. Why did the world always have to change for the worse?  

Ironically, though, picking up a couple of my soccer trophies just now has convinced that they probably got less mean after 2002. How did I reach this conclusion, you ask. Well, despite being double the size of my other trophies, this first one is lighter! The later trophies were actually made out of some metal alloy and were slightly sturdier. This clearly would have increased production costs and thus forced a dramatic reduction in size. I’m not quite sure what a fiscally corrective size reduction would be, but it seems likely that the sizes of the later trophies were not less expensive than the first trophy. Indeed, they might very well have been more expensive, since the price relationship between plastic trophies and metal trophies surely must look like this:

Lexically represented, this conveys that the price relationship is a chasmic parallel correlation (there’s probably a technical term for this kind of graph that I’m not aware of, not having done any statistics). If you still have no idea what the heck I’m blabbering about, I mean to say that a plastic trophy is probably always going to be cheaper unless you reduce the size of the metal trophy to infinitesimal proportions, which would make no sense. If this hypothesis is true, it guarantees that Kissing Point Soccer Club (KPSC, for short) actually got less parsimonious and more generous after 2002.

Question: why do I waste my life doing these things?