The Shorter Wisden 2013 (26 page)

We were one of the few sides that looked in depth at who we were up against, where they scored their runs, what sort of bowling they had. We didn’t have the technology, but we did have a
great camaraderie with the umpires, and we used them to find out what other pitches were like, who didn’t fancy the short ball, and so on. One of the first things Jack introduced was a
lengthy team sit-down to discuss the opposition.

Jack retired in 1972, and David Lloyd took us to three successive finals in 1974–76. Half of that great team then retired, and we never really recovered. But we were there at the beginning
of tactics in one-day cricket. Mind you, we didn’t have all the background staff they have now. We always had trainers, a doctor and a physio, but no one for the mind. We didn’t need
people telling us what great players we were.

The 1971 semi-final against Gloucestershire is one of my most precious memories. The nine o’clock news was postponed, and it was really dark. In fact, the more I talk about it, the darker
it gets! There were 25,000 people there: our late chairman Cedric Rhoades took the sightscreens out to fit in more spectators, and the kids on the grass pushed the rope in. It was such a dramatic
climax.

Hughes played for Lancashire between 1967 and 1991. He hit 24 in an over from off-spinner John Mortimore to win that 1971 Gillette Cup semi-final.

The 1980s – Clive Radley

We were a little bit ahead of our time in one-day cricket, without really knowing it. But it certainly wasn’t through any deep thinking about the game. Mike Brearley
preferred to cajole – or possibly bollock – players on an individual basis. He was less formulaic than those who had gone before. Don’t give him too much credit, though: we had a
great side.

Our bowling was capable of both getting wickets and keeping batsmen quiet: Philippe Edmonds, John Emburey, Wayne Daniel, Mike Selvey and Vintcent van der Bijl. The seamers were very good at the
death, too.

Things got more athletic as the decade went on, and we started doing a bit more in the gym in pre-season. Fielding circles arrived in 1981. Before that, we could put everyone back on the
boundary in the last ten overs and close the game down. Seam bowlers used to be hidden in the field: they’d stick out a size 11, or let someone else chase. Now, they had to start putting in a
dive.

I was fairly fit even in my forties, and the slide I used in order to ground my bat between runs just developed naturally as it seemed the quickest way to get back down the other end; it
didn’t damage the old knees because I didn’t bat in studs. My forte was nicking and nudging. Mike Gatting and Roland Butcher were good at smacking the ball, so if they were going at
five an over and I was going at three, we were doing well.

The first person to play the reverse sweep in county cricket must have been Mushtaq Mohammad, against Fred Titmus. He told me he’d got fed up with six–three leg-side fields. It was a
great stroke, and I must have batted with Gatt while he got 300 runs with it. But after he got out in the 1987 World Cup final, he didn’t play it for another two years. I wish I’d
played it myself, but I had my method, and there wasn’t much time to practise.

I never took part in any game that matched our Benson and Hedges Cup final against Essex in 1983. They were 127 for one chasing 197, and the Middlesex supporters had left the ground. We had
given the game up, and everyone was round the bat. I caught Keith Fletcher at silly point off Edmonds, and the rest collapsed. It was just one of those days.

Radley played for Middlesex between 1964 and 1987. He won the match awards in the 1983 Benson and Hedges Cup and 1984 NatWest Trophy finals.

The 1990s – Paul Smith

Warwickshire’s one-day success wasn’t a fluke. We had every character and skill imaginable, and then this bloke came along with a massive passion for what he did:
Bob Woolmer. Chalk and cheese were Woolmer and Dermot Reeve, our captain. Woolly would say: “Why don’t you go to bed at ten o’clock, like I do?” Reeve wanted to go out and
enjoy himself. But it worked.

Tactically, we were miles ahead of the rest. We had the balls to do what they could have done but didn’t want to. In the 1990s in general, you had to be in people’s faces, and we
played a different type of cricket, with lots of reverse sweeps and tip-and-run. And we had big strikers of the ball. It wasn’t popular. I remember our batsmen reverse-sweeping, and the
commentators saying it wasn’t in the spirit of the game. Brian Lara said we should look at where the gaps were, not the fielders. It made you think very differently.

Woolmer provided a sprinkling of gold dust. People think of his computers, but they forget about the hours he spent in the nets, in the middle, in restaurants – all that time with the
guys, talking to them, thinking about them.

We turned up at Old Trafford once, and Woolly took out a tennis racket and hit catches to us. The crowd were shouting: “Aww, don’t you want to hurt your hands?” But they
didn’t realise that, from 50 feet up, a tennis ball will bounce out, so it was teaching us about soft hands. He also introduced warm-downs, even though they were the last thing we wanted to
do.

Woolly said to us at the start of the 1994 season that we could win all four competitions. I thought he was barking mad. But we nearly did. Shortly after, Jason Ratcliffe moved from Warwickshire
to Surrey, and he reckons it took other counties five years to catch up with us.

Smith played for Warwickshire between 1982 and 1996. He was part of the winning team in four Lord’s finals and won the Gold Award in the 1994 Benson and Hedges Cup
final.

The 2000s – Jeremy Snape

During my time at Northamptonshire, the focus was on talent. But at Gloucester we trained as a team – and to a different intensity. The fielder went from being someone who
defends the ball to someone who attacks the batsman. We would stand in a ring, like fishermen tightening the net. The batsman would hit it hard to point, and the fielder would return the ball just
as hard to Jack Russell, who would take it in front of the batsman’s face. It was oppressive and claustrophobic. Our coach John Bracewell shifted our mindset, from cricketers to athletes who
play cricket.

We saw ourselves as underdogs. We worked exceptionally hard, and there was me, Martyn Ball and Kim Barnett trying to take pace off the ball, on slow, knee-high wickets, with big outfields, and
batsmen caught in the deep. We played ugly cricket – but we won.

When I moved to Leicestershire before the 2003 season, we weren’t challenging in the Championship, so we focused on Twenty20. We worked out how to pace the initial impetus phase of an
innings, the building phase, and the crescendo. We caught other sides out. Everyone was thinking fast bowlers should bowl as fast as they can, but that creates pace and angles. And batsmen thought
they had to be ultra-aggressive, whereas we’d worked out the value of players like Darren Maddy and Brad Hodge – one a hitter, the other a rotator.

It was a time of innovation, too. I was in the nets with H. D. Ackerman when he asked me to help him practise his six hitting. So I pulled out the pin and bowled a looping hand grenade. He said:
“Don’t be stupid, I can’t hit that!” A light bulb went on, and the moon-ball was born. Batsmen would think: “I can’t get out to that, it’s only
40mph...”

Twenty20 has definitely benefited the wider game. In my early career, a yorker could land anywhere under a batsman’s feet. Now, it has to be on the white line of the batting crease to
compensate for batsmen’s power and scoop shots. And people are much more comfortable in high-pressure run-chases: they get 250 in 50 overs easily. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was all
about protein shakes and bleep tests; in the last six to eight years, it’s been more pitch-maps and Hawk-Eye. There are no secrets now. The only competitive advantage is what goes on inside
players’ heads.

Snape played for Northamptonshire, Gloucestershire and Leicestershire between 1992 and 2008. He won four Lord’s finals with Gloucestershire, and the Twenty20 Cup
twice with Leicestershire.

Tanya Aldred writes about sport for the
Daily Telegraph.

A QUESTION OF TALENT

M
IKE
A
THERTON

Boy, he looked good. Sitting there in his crisp, grey suit, hair slicked back, tanned, square of jaw, he looked as if he could have played for another decade. But Mark
Ramprakash had decided enough was enough. The runs had not flowed with their customary ease and, midway through his 26th summer in the first-class game, it was time to reflect on what had gone,
rather than speculate about what was to come.

Rightly, the valedictories were gushing. This was a batsman, after all, who had scored over 35,000 first-class runs at an average of 53, and joined the elite group of those who have made more
than 100 first-class hundreds. Because of the impact an expanded international game has had on appearances in domestic cricket, he could well be the last member of the club. At every level except
the very top, he made batting look easy. He was a fine player.

Many pieces were written about Ramprakash in the days after his retirement, and many included the phrase “the most talented player of his generation”. A few suggested his talent was
unfulfilled, which seemed a little harsh, even if it reflected his travails in over a decade of Test cricket. The implication was that he had underperformed, a view based on a perception of the
ability he was blessed with.

Talent. We have a curious relationship with it in English cricket. If it is generally defined as possessing either a natural gift, or a capacity for success, then our game invariably tags as
talented those who enjoy the gift, but not necessarily the success. Many England cricketers who have struggled to establish themselves in the international game – Chris Lewis, Mark Lathwell,
Owais Shah and Ravi Bopara, to name four recent examples – are routinely described as being among the most talented players of their time.

The notion of a natural gift has taken a battering in recent years, thanks in particular to the work of one scientist. The Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson has gone a long way towards
deconstructing the myths of talent by showing that elite performance is almost always the result of ferocious hard work, relentless self-improvement and specific, rigorous practice – all
within a cultural context in which the appetite for self-improvement can flourish. In other words, few have reached the top without putting in the hours.

Ericsson’s work is now widely accepted, but there are still some who believe in inherent or inheritable gifts. For sports such as basketball, which require genetically linked physical
advantages, it is hard not to sympathise with this view. But whichever side of the divide you tread, it should be obvious that the term tends to be applied retrospectively. In describing someone as
talented, we do not really mean they have some innate predisposition to perform; rather, it is a convenient way of explaining their achievements (or even, in English cricket, their
shortcomings).

In looking for examples of talent, we nearly always exaggerate the importance of an eye-catching moment, or a graceful style. Aesthetics outweigh almost everything else. Ramprakash’s feats
were far from modest, but it was his elegance – the ease with which he appeared to play, the extra time he appeared to enjoy – that encouraged the notion he was unusually talented.

Very few observers, by contrast, would describe South Africa’s Graeme Smith as naturally gifted. With his wide, ungainly stance, strangling grip, and closed-face back-lift, he makes
batting look hard work. And yet his method makes perfect sense. In an era where bowling at fourth stump is accepted practice, and when fielders in the arc between wicketkeeper and point often
outnumber the rest, Smith’s refusal to hit in areas traditionally regarded as left-handers’ strengths gives him an advantage. More than 8,500 Test runs at nearly 50 as an opening
batsman suggest he possesses talents that transcend mere aesthetics (or their absence).

Most of us are prone to this weakness of falling for the kind of talent that a moment of brilliance implies: a breathtaking stroke, a scintillating piece of fielding. As a result, we
underestimate the gifts given to those who achieve consistently, if not spectacularly. After watching a young Dwayne Smith, the West Indian all-rounder who had made a rapid century on Test debut,
smash a length ball from Steve Harmison over midwicket and out of the ground in Trinidad some years ago, I turned to my companion and said: “I’ve just seen the next great West Indian
batsman.” One shot was enough to fool me. All through the disappointing years that followed, I kept expecting what I thought was exceptional talent to blossom. It never did.

We are apt to hold too narrow a definition of what constitutes talent. One of Ramprakash’s contemporaries was Graham Thorpe. More than a decade ago in Colombo, I watched him score a
hundred against Sri Lanka’s spinners in conditions that could not have been more testing, with the sun beating down and the pitch disintegrating into dust. His strokeplay was not
eye-catching; in fact, the innings was devoid of any flowing shots at all. But what an innings it was – one of the finest I ever saw from an England player.

That day, Thorpe revealed so many different aspects of
his
talent. He played the ball off the pitch later than any of his team-mates. It takes a particular gift to let the ball keep
coming and coming until the bowler is almost yelping with success, but he adopted a kind of French-cricket technique, keeping his back-lift low, and turning the blade with his wrists at the last
moment to pierce gaps that most others would have needed satellite navigation to find. His talent was to adapt to his surroundings.

As for my own career, I take an innings of 99 at Headingley against South Africa in 1994 as one that revealed my own special – for want of another word – talent. It was after the
dirt-in-the-pocket match at Lord’s and, in the intervening week, I had to cope with an unusual degree of public interest, with a tabloid tracking my every movement. Between Tests, I had not
been able to practise, and there had been no county match for Lancashire.