chris.hinton
International Captain
it is a little bit the same but more indepth and better english
-
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Me on leg-spin
- Thread starter chris.hinton
- Start date
Neil Pickup
Cricket Web Moderator
Post it here first so we can double check a few things and correct your grammar
As for leg-spin: I think you've got a bit of a tunnel-vision issue here. It's not just leg spin that is the issue with attack against containment, it's the whole mentality of English Cricket.
We go out there to avoid defeat too often rather than risk the win, and yes, the old boys' club mentality does have an impact on that.
Looking at Leg-spin, there was an interesting sentence in the coaching manual that I thought summed up a lot of the issues. Can't remember what is was, will find it tonight.
As a batter, i would much rather face an Off Spinner or a Pace bowler than a Leggie. I have the problem of pushing forward at the ball and then it turning past my outside edge so I am usually stumped.
In the last 2 weeks i have started bowling leg spin in practise after a year of trying to get constant line and length. In the senior competion in Christchurch I am the only peoson bowling it.
I think because leg spin is quite hard to control not many people bowl it, which means not many people can play it.
In the last 2 weeks i have started bowling leg spin in practise after a year of trying to get constant line and length. In the senior competion in Christchurch I am the only peoson bowling it.
I think because leg spin is quite hard to control not many people bowl it, which means not many people can play it.
chris.hinton
International Captain
t is the most famous ball in cricket. There were others among the millions sent down in thousands of great matches that were more significant in affecting a result, but no single delivery lives so starkly in the memory and so sharply defines an era as the leg break Shane Warne inflicted on Mike Gatting at Old Trafford in 1993.
Can you see it now? It began its trajectory innocently enough, flipped with apparent nonchalance from the upper side of Warne's wrist, but from the instant it left his inordinately strong fingers it was humming like one of those silent bombs that destroy towns. In the second second of its life, it floated above the eye-line then dipped sharply to the right, outside the line of the leg stump, dragging Gatting's gaze into his own Bermuda Triangle. As it gripped the turf and violently changed direction, snapping back past his redundant bat, Gatting was rendered a mere witness to the drama. Turned, he was facing the wrong way as the ball slammed into his off stump, several feet from its point of arrival. The batsman could do no more than look back in wonder, stumble a little and depart. He would come to acknowledge he had been made a bit player in sporting history.
People with little interest in cricket remember it. And even now, having taken more than 400 Test wickets, Warne regards that ball as the finest he has ever conjured up. If he were even to dream of bowling a better one, he could legitimately be accused of arrogance.
It did not just bowl Gatting, it so relieved him of dignity that, to this day, it is what he is remembered for. That is largely because it was on television, but no amount of showbiz can detract from the beauty of the moment. That one delivery changed the face of modern cricket. After years of unremitting pace, it gave us a reason again to celebrate subtlety, to revel in devious skill and witness the product of its perfect execution.
'You could put the start of it all down to that one ball,' Terry Jenner says of the revival of leg-spin and the subsequent obsession with all its variations. He should know. Jenner, who turned his leg-breaks for Australia in the Seventies, is, like Gatting, unfairly but better remembered for his part in Warne's story. It was Jenner who rescued the young Warne from his excesses when he first attended Australian cricket's famed academy in Adelaide. It was Jenner - or TJ as he is universally known - who nurtured Warne's talent and who has chivvied him up and fine-tuned his bowling at various crisis points in his remarkable career.
And it is Jenner who has been asked to find another Warne - for England.
There will never be another Warne, of course, but there is no harm in looking. To that end, Jenner is employed by the England Cricket Board to scour the country for wrist-spinners, left or right-handed, and turn them into proper players. 'I sit down with him some times and say, "You've been good, Shane - but you've also been bad." And he looks at me as if I'm going to have a go at something he's done privately, and I say, "Because you've been too good."
'See, everybody now wants their leg-spinner to be as good as him. They're not and they cannot be. They can't bowl with men in close, they can't bowl like that, but if they don't everybody thinks, "Hang on, that's how you're meant to bowl, that's how Shane Warne bowls." So, indirectly he's made the game so much tougher for every leg-spinner who's followed him.'
And tough is the way Jenner likes it. He doesn't believe young wrist spinners will last unless they go through the 'hard yakka'. He is critical of the ethos of modern cricket, which demands accuracy above invention, which encourages artisans above artists. Neither is he convinced that people who run cricket truly appreciate the potency of leg-spin; they don't understand it, he says, and they look for a quick fix because it's what appeals to the ideas merchants. And sometimes he doubts if the kids delivered to him each summer want it enough - and then he will see a prodigy who lights up his eyes.
We're sitting under a willow tree on pitch number seven at King's School in Taunton as 20 of the best young leg-spinners in the country go through a round robin of matches to determine which three of them will go next month to the same academy in Adelaide that gave Warne his start. The object is to produce a world-class leg-spinner for England by 2007. Jenner knows it is a wildly ambitious aim but he knows too, and tells his young disciples, that the very nature of leg-spin is about gambling, about daring to do the outrageous.
A round, red-headed aspirant from Manchester called Aaron Barton-Wells is waddling towards the stumps, the ball tucked inside his coiled grip, and Jenner's eyes light up. Barton-Wells releases the ball and it fizzes on that treacherous flight path towards the batsman, turning viciously just in front of him.
I'd faced Aaron and a couple of the other young leg-spinners in the nets that morning and can testify to the energy they put on the ball. Above all, Jenner is determined that they do not lose the essence of their skill. He doesn't want them losing sleep about developing wrong'uns and flippers and zooters; the priority is to turn the damn thing.
'What do we look for when we say, "I've seen a good leg-spinner?" What attracted you to him? It was his spin. Certainly, there was some shape on it, but mainly it was the spin. You say, "Wow, he span it!"'
There is a lot of 'wow' in Jenner's voice as he watches Aaron turn his leg-breaks. But the coach is hard and objective too. He knows this is not an indulgence, it is a job. The England Cricket Board and the Brian Johnston Trust that funds the scheme demand results. So, as sentimental as he can be, Jenner is also hard on the group.
As a kid who grew up playing on matting wickets in rural Western Australia, he is familiar with the tough end of the game, and, as anyone who has played cricket in Australia will testify, practice and work are at the core of success. TJ is not convinced, by any stretch, that the same ethic exists here, where club cricket is often an excuse to gather later in the bar. (Not that he dismisses that side of the equation.)
'I quote to all the kids something that Greg Chappell said: "The one thing you shouldn't do is just go to the nets for a bat and a bowl. You should always go to improve." I thought it was a lovely line, and so pertinent.'
The most palpable element of his personality Jenner brings to his work is his Australianness, if there is such a word. Ian Salisbury and Chris Schofield, England's only quality wrist spinners, have benefited from his counsel, but TJ is professional enough to stand back from his involvement and declare they are still not good enough. It is the sort of judgment you would demand of an accountant. It is the sort of thing an Aussie would say.
The comparison with Warne is never far away. He contrasts how Warne recovered from a woeful start in Test cricket and how Salisbury and Schofield have yet to overcome their own shortcomings.
'Schofield got a central contract and probably thought he was made, because his only competition was Salisbury, who had had a bit of a shocker in Pakistan. So, Schofield thought, "From here on in it's plain sailing." So it comes back to attitude. Shane came back and took the right attitude, and I'm not 100 per cent sure that Chris has. He shouldn't be playing Second XI cricket for his county, and he wouldn't be if he was doing what everyone wanted of him. At the same stage of their careers, each had a choice; thankfully Warne made the right one. So far, Schofield hasn't. And a lot of things I hear Salisbury, for example, say are those of a seasoned old pro.'
It's an attitude that Jenner has no time for. 'I think that's one of the things you learn watching all the Australians playing here. Remember, if Australians played in England a long time ago, they'd get rid of you: Bruce Dooland, Colin McCool. Then there was a period when one or two had a bit of a stint here: Mark Waugh, Alan Border. But no one took it seriously. Now, because they're full-time professionals, we can't stop them. Suddenly, Australians are in the championship. There were a lot of West Indians, South Africans, New Zealanders - but the one they wanted all along was the brash, hard-to-handle Australian, and it is that player who has had an impact in county cricket. Now, there is a need for it, the way the whole game is played, so we get a bit more of that brashness - and then it translates into leg-spin. Because that's where it will come from, through attitude. If we get a change there, the leg-spinner will have a role to play.'
Attitude is everything. Tom Moody, Worcestershire's Australian director of cricket, says the same thing. It is not so much that county cricket is soft, which is the oft-quoted criticism of the English game, but, he observes, that, from an early stage, the game here is not taken seriously. David Gower, a minor genius as Mike Brearley aptly described him, is probably the perfect example of it.
And leg-spinners cannot thrive in an environment of relaxed insouciance. They need hard work, long spells, time to cope with disappointment as well as success. They also need understanding and indulgence, which Jenner says are rarely evident at any level of the game, either here or in Australia.
'The system isn't designed to produce them. We're playing too many limited-over cricket matches. And everybody plays those games with a limited-over mentality. They don't just play 50 overs. Everyone is thinking dot ball, dot ball, dot ball. They're not thinking about the development of the game; hence, we're getting a lot of lads at a young age who may be promising spinners who, in the name of accuracy, are eliminating their spin. From there, we lose out.'
Wrist spin demands courage. For a start, you have to bear the brunt of a captain's scepticism, usually, because he will not wholly understand what you're trying to do. What you are trying to do is anathema to misers, it is the encouragement of a challenge. You want the batsman to come looking for you, you want him to chase that wider ball, to flash at it and spoon a catch into the covers. But, in between those delicious wicket-taking balls there will inevitably be dross, the one that is dragged down by an anxious arm and sits up begging to be carted into the next county, the one that balloons embarrassingly and gets hammered with the crack of a cannon past the poor sod at short leg.
The other knock against wrist spinners in England has been that the conditions do not favour them. Jenner disagrees vehemently. 'I don't think it's the conditions. I tell you why: because every good leg-spinner who's come here has been successful - so it can't be the conditions. It's the attitude. They say, "leg-spinners can't bowl on these pitches, they're too slow." Rubbish. You just bowl further up to the bat.'
So much of cricket is encrusted with old prejudices such as these. Opinions, unchallenged, become mantras. As do fiddling aspects of the game like field placings and batting orders and a host of other 'traditions'. For a game so open to invention, cricket is weighed down by tons of history.
I recount to Jenner an episode of introducing a promising young leg spinner from Rotherham to the former England off-spinner, Eddie Hemmings. When I asked Hemmings what advice he had for the bowler, he replied in that worn way of the old pro: 'Emigrate.'
Jenner is an admirer of Hemmings as a cricketer who made the most of his talents, a former seamer who turned himself into an off-break bowler and made a decent living out of it, but says the thinking is typical. It is what is holding back the development of an exciting part of the game. Jenner sees no puzzle. Wrist spinners turn the ball. Getting it on the spot is another thing, but essentially that is their strength, and he is frustrated that not many people understand what is a simple truth.
'Now they say, "I've got this leggie who bowled 10 overs for 14 today." Is that a good young spinner? Invariably that's a bloke who's bowling pretty darty stuff that goes straight. But you know what we do - and this is where we're losing them - we get this good young leg-spinner who gives it a rip, he comes into a side and he plays and he's exposed to the senior environment. They fast-track him, we do all those things that we think today is terrific. Then the first thing that happens is the senior pro or the captain comes up to him and says, "If you're going to play at this level, you have to be a bit quicker than that, mate, a bit flatter."
'So, we find this bloke that's got terrific spin and he stops spinning it to be accurate - just so he can get a game. Now, if I were him, I'd probably do the same thing. But, as a coach I'd say don't do it. I'd say, "develop your accuracy with your spin". Then you've got a long career. Short term, yes you can get a game in the under-15s because you're accurate. But, if you want to be around at the top level when you're 25 or 26, and not playing club cricket on a Wednesday night somewhere, then you've got to nurture your spin and become accurate with it.'
It's that leap in ambition Jenner is looking for. As he watches the likes of Barton-Wells, who missed out on a trip to Adelaide, and Michael Munday, Andy Ward and Liam Crilley, who are packing their bags, his pride is evident. It's not that they are his prodigies but that they have listened to what he has said and have decided to risk it, to have a go.
Jenner knows both sides of that coin. He compromised his adventurous bowling style in an effort to establish himself in the Australian team and wasn't totally successful, bowling flatter than he would have liked, although good judges say he was badly handled and should have had more than his one tour to the West Indies.
When injuries and rows with selectors cut short his career, Jenner faced other demons. He was jailed for fraud after dipping into his employer's funds to pay off gambling debts, but showed enormous resilience to rebuild his life, and is a better man for the experience. When he talks to kids, he doesn't fudge judgments, because he has been to some pretty hard places where such niceties mean nothing.
He might not agree, but the courage - or desperation, perhaps - needed to gamble is probably what made him such a fine bowler. He got it wrong away from the cricket pitch, but he is back there now, passing on to young spinners the sort of wisdom that helped shape the finest leg-break bowler of them all.
Jenner is a complex character, as are most spin bowlers. He knows he is asking a lot of these kids, but he gives them so much too. As the week comes to close, he has to pick three from the group to go to Adelaide. On the final afternoon, he turns to his partner, Ann, and you know he is suffering. The last thing he wants to do is disappoint young cricketers who achingly want to do well in the game's most difficult department. 'They always said I was a hard bastard,' he tells them, 'but I can't help but get emotional too. I just want you to know that you are all still part of this programme. It is ongoing. Just because you might miss out on going to the academy doesn't mean you are a failure. Not by any means.'
A short silence goes before the gentle applause, an appreciation by the group for a rather special man.
from the times
Can you see it now? It began its trajectory innocently enough, flipped with apparent nonchalance from the upper side of Warne's wrist, but from the instant it left his inordinately strong fingers it was humming like one of those silent bombs that destroy towns. In the second second of its life, it floated above the eye-line then dipped sharply to the right, outside the line of the leg stump, dragging Gatting's gaze into his own Bermuda Triangle. As it gripped the turf and violently changed direction, snapping back past his redundant bat, Gatting was rendered a mere witness to the drama. Turned, he was facing the wrong way as the ball slammed into his off stump, several feet from its point of arrival. The batsman could do no more than look back in wonder, stumble a little and depart. He would come to acknowledge he had been made a bit player in sporting history.
People with little interest in cricket remember it. And even now, having taken more than 400 Test wickets, Warne regards that ball as the finest he has ever conjured up. If he were even to dream of bowling a better one, he could legitimately be accused of arrogance.
It did not just bowl Gatting, it so relieved him of dignity that, to this day, it is what he is remembered for. That is largely because it was on television, but no amount of showbiz can detract from the beauty of the moment. That one delivery changed the face of modern cricket. After years of unremitting pace, it gave us a reason again to celebrate subtlety, to revel in devious skill and witness the product of its perfect execution.
'You could put the start of it all down to that one ball,' Terry Jenner says of the revival of leg-spin and the subsequent obsession with all its variations. He should know. Jenner, who turned his leg-breaks for Australia in the Seventies, is, like Gatting, unfairly but better remembered for his part in Warne's story. It was Jenner who rescued the young Warne from his excesses when he first attended Australian cricket's famed academy in Adelaide. It was Jenner - or TJ as he is universally known - who nurtured Warne's talent and who has chivvied him up and fine-tuned his bowling at various crisis points in his remarkable career.
And it is Jenner who has been asked to find another Warne - for England.
There will never be another Warne, of course, but there is no harm in looking. To that end, Jenner is employed by the England Cricket Board to scour the country for wrist-spinners, left or right-handed, and turn them into proper players. 'I sit down with him some times and say, "You've been good, Shane - but you've also been bad." And he looks at me as if I'm going to have a go at something he's done privately, and I say, "Because you've been too good."
'See, everybody now wants their leg-spinner to be as good as him. They're not and they cannot be. They can't bowl with men in close, they can't bowl like that, but if they don't everybody thinks, "Hang on, that's how you're meant to bowl, that's how Shane Warne bowls." So, indirectly he's made the game so much tougher for every leg-spinner who's followed him.'
And tough is the way Jenner likes it. He doesn't believe young wrist spinners will last unless they go through the 'hard yakka'. He is critical of the ethos of modern cricket, which demands accuracy above invention, which encourages artisans above artists. Neither is he convinced that people who run cricket truly appreciate the potency of leg-spin; they don't understand it, he says, and they look for a quick fix because it's what appeals to the ideas merchants. And sometimes he doubts if the kids delivered to him each summer want it enough - and then he will see a prodigy who lights up his eyes.
We're sitting under a willow tree on pitch number seven at King's School in Taunton as 20 of the best young leg-spinners in the country go through a round robin of matches to determine which three of them will go next month to the same academy in Adelaide that gave Warne his start. The object is to produce a world-class leg-spinner for England by 2007. Jenner knows it is a wildly ambitious aim but he knows too, and tells his young disciples, that the very nature of leg-spin is about gambling, about daring to do the outrageous.
A round, red-headed aspirant from Manchester called Aaron Barton-Wells is waddling towards the stumps, the ball tucked inside his coiled grip, and Jenner's eyes light up. Barton-Wells releases the ball and it fizzes on that treacherous flight path towards the batsman, turning viciously just in front of him.
I'd faced Aaron and a couple of the other young leg-spinners in the nets that morning and can testify to the energy they put on the ball. Above all, Jenner is determined that they do not lose the essence of their skill. He doesn't want them losing sleep about developing wrong'uns and flippers and zooters; the priority is to turn the damn thing.
'What do we look for when we say, "I've seen a good leg-spinner?" What attracted you to him? It was his spin. Certainly, there was some shape on it, but mainly it was the spin. You say, "Wow, he span it!"'
There is a lot of 'wow' in Jenner's voice as he watches Aaron turn his leg-breaks. But the coach is hard and objective too. He knows this is not an indulgence, it is a job. The England Cricket Board and the Brian Johnston Trust that funds the scheme demand results. So, as sentimental as he can be, Jenner is also hard on the group.
As a kid who grew up playing on matting wickets in rural Western Australia, he is familiar with the tough end of the game, and, as anyone who has played cricket in Australia will testify, practice and work are at the core of success. TJ is not convinced, by any stretch, that the same ethic exists here, where club cricket is often an excuse to gather later in the bar. (Not that he dismisses that side of the equation.)
'I quote to all the kids something that Greg Chappell said: "The one thing you shouldn't do is just go to the nets for a bat and a bowl. You should always go to improve." I thought it was a lovely line, and so pertinent.'
The most palpable element of his personality Jenner brings to his work is his Australianness, if there is such a word. Ian Salisbury and Chris Schofield, England's only quality wrist spinners, have benefited from his counsel, but TJ is professional enough to stand back from his involvement and declare they are still not good enough. It is the sort of judgment you would demand of an accountant. It is the sort of thing an Aussie would say.
The comparison with Warne is never far away. He contrasts how Warne recovered from a woeful start in Test cricket and how Salisbury and Schofield have yet to overcome their own shortcomings.
'Schofield got a central contract and probably thought he was made, because his only competition was Salisbury, who had had a bit of a shocker in Pakistan. So, Schofield thought, "From here on in it's plain sailing." So it comes back to attitude. Shane came back and took the right attitude, and I'm not 100 per cent sure that Chris has. He shouldn't be playing Second XI cricket for his county, and he wouldn't be if he was doing what everyone wanted of him. At the same stage of their careers, each had a choice; thankfully Warne made the right one. So far, Schofield hasn't. And a lot of things I hear Salisbury, for example, say are those of a seasoned old pro.'
It's an attitude that Jenner has no time for. 'I think that's one of the things you learn watching all the Australians playing here. Remember, if Australians played in England a long time ago, they'd get rid of you: Bruce Dooland, Colin McCool. Then there was a period when one or two had a bit of a stint here: Mark Waugh, Alan Border. But no one took it seriously. Now, because they're full-time professionals, we can't stop them. Suddenly, Australians are in the championship. There were a lot of West Indians, South Africans, New Zealanders - but the one they wanted all along was the brash, hard-to-handle Australian, and it is that player who has had an impact in county cricket. Now, there is a need for it, the way the whole game is played, so we get a bit more of that brashness - and then it translates into leg-spin. Because that's where it will come from, through attitude. If we get a change there, the leg-spinner will have a role to play.'
Attitude is everything. Tom Moody, Worcestershire's Australian director of cricket, says the same thing. It is not so much that county cricket is soft, which is the oft-quoted criticism of the English game, but, he observes, that, from an early stage, the game here is not taken seriously. David Gower, a minor genius as Mike Brearley aptly described him, is probably the perfect example of it.
And leg-spinners cannot thrive in an environment of relaxed insouciance. They need hard work, long spells, time to cope with disappointment as well as success. They also need understanding and indulgence, which Jenner says are rarely evident at any level of the game, either here or in Australia.
'The system isn't designed to produce them. We're playing too many limited-over cricket matches. And everybody plays those games with a limited-over mentality. They don't just play 50 overs. Everyone is thinking dot ball, dot ball, dot ball. They're not thinking about the development of the game; hence, we're getting a lot of lads at a young age who may be promising spinners who, in the name of accuracy, are eliminating their spin. From there, we lose out.'
Wrist spin demands courage. For a start, you have to bear the brunt of a captain's scepticism, usually, because he will not wholly understand what you're trying to do. What you are trying to do is anathema to misers, it is the encouragement of a challenge. You want the batsman to come looking for you, you want him to chase that wider ball, to flash at it and spoon a catch into the covers. But, in between those delicious wicket-taking balls there will inevitably be dross, the one that is dragged down by an anxious arm and sits up begging to be carted into the next county, the one that balloons embarrassingly and gets hammered with the crack of a cannon past the poor sod at short leg.
The other knock against wrist spinners in England has been that the conditions do not favour them. Jenner disagrees vehemently. 'I don't think it's the conditions. I tell you why: because every good leg-spinner who's come here has been successful - so it can't be the conditions. It's the attitude. They say, "leg-spinners can't bowl on these pitches, they're too slow." Rubbish. You just bowl further up to the bat.'
So much of cricket is encrusted with old prejudices such as these. Opinions, unchallenged, become mantras. As do fiddling aspects of the game like field placings and batting orders and a host of other 'traditions'. For a game so open to invention, cricket is weighed down by tons of history.
I recount to Jenner an episode of introducing a promising young leg spinner from Rotherham to the former England off-spinner, Eddie Hemmings. When I asked Hemmings what advice he had for the bowler, he replied in that worn way of the old pro: 'Emigrate.'
Jenner is an admirer of Hemmings as a cricketer who made the most of his talents, a former seamer who turned himself into an off-break bowler and made a decent living out of it, but says the thinking is typical. It is what is holding back the development of an exciting part of the game. Jenner sees no puzzle. Wrist spinners turn the ball. Getting it on the spot is another thing, but essentially that is their strength, and he is frustrated that not many people understand what is a simple truth.
'Now they say, "I've got this leggie who bowled 10 overs for 14 today." Is that a good young spinner? Invariably that's a bloke who's bowling pretty darty stuff that goes straight. But you know what we do - and this is where we're losing them - we get this good young leg-spinner who gives it a rip, he comes into a side and he plays and he's exposed to the senior environment. They fast-track him, we do all those things that we think today is terrific. Then the first thing that happens is the senior pro or the captain comes up to him and says, "If you're going to play at this level, you have to be a bit quicker than that, mate, a bit flatter."
'So, we find this bloke that's got terrific spin and he stops spinning it to be accurate - just so he can get a game. Now, if I were him, I'd probably do the same thing. But, as a coach I'd say don't do it. I'd say, "develop your accuracy with your spin". Then you've got a long career. Short term, yes you can get a game in the under-15s because you're accurate. But, if you want to be around at the top level when you're 25 or 26, and not playing club cricket on a Wednesday night somewhere, then you've got to nurture your spin and become accurate with it.'
It's that leap in ambition Jenner is looking for. As he watches the likes of Barton-Wells, who missed out on a trip to Adelaide, and Michael Munday, Andy Ward and Liam Crilley, who are packing their bags, his pride is evident. It's not that they are his prodigies but that they have listened to what he has said and have decided to risk it, to have a go.
Jenner knows both sides of that coin. He compromised his adventurous bowling style in an effort to establish himself in the Australian team and wasn't totally successful, bowling flatter than he would have liked, although good judges say he was badly handled and should have had more than his one tour to the West Indies.
When injuries and rows with selectors cut short his career, Jenner faced other demons. He was jailed for fraud after dipping into his employer's funds to pay off gambling debts, but showed enormous resilience to rebuild his life, and is a better man for the experience. When he talks to kids, he doesn't fudge judgments, because he has been to some pretty hard places where such niceties mean nothing.
He might not agree, but the courage - or desperation, perhaps - needed to gamble is probably what made him such a fine bowler. He got it wrong away from the cricket pitch, but he is back there now, passing on to young spinners the sort of wisdom that helped shape the finest leg-break bowler of them all.
Jenner is a complex character, as are most spin bowlers. He knows he is asking a lot of these kids, but he gives them so much too. As the week comes to close, he has to pick three from the group to go to Adelaide. On the final afternoon, he turns to his partner, Ann, and you know he is suffering. The last thing he wants to do is disappoint young cricketers who achingly want to do well in the game's most difficult department. 'They always said I was a hard bastard,' he tells them, 'but I can't help but get emotional too. I just want you to know that you are all still part of this programme. It is ongoing. Just because you might miss out on going to the academy doesn't mean you are a failure. Not by any means.'
A short silence goes before the gentle applause, an appreciation by the group for a rather special man.
from the times
