A question of technique

Simple games often become complicated by over-analysis. Football: very simple. Get ball, kick ball, goal. And yet whole days of TV coverage and an ever-increasing amount of newsprint can be wasted on every 50/50 offside decision and not-given penalty. Every top flight player has the very basics of their game poured over in excruciating detail to the point of tedium. American football takes it to the nth degree, but that may be something in the American psyche. All their sports seem to lend themselves to their inner statto.

Cricket is also a simple game, but it lends itself all too kindly to over-analysis. The time between overs has to be filled, as do lunch and tea breaks, let alone the periods between days. TV companies have a duty to fill these interregnums and hiatuses, but the administrators and coaches also seem to keep themselves busy at such times. The ECB are the worst culprits with that bloody Academy. In an illuminating piece in the Guardian, the mantra of Virender Sehwag - "watch ball, hit ball" - gets to the root of batting in four words. How many more hours are we going to have to sit through a Bob Willis lecture on technique and trigger movements or listen to a coach explain how a batsman doesn't make it to the England side because his head isn't in the right place? Then that player goes and gets his action or technique remodelled in the Academy and comes back with a string of stress fractures and a career shortened by a good five years.

And yet these are the same people lamenting the retirement of Marcus Trescothick. The last decent, powerful opener England had plays like his feet are superglued to the floor. He makes up for this with an incredible eye and throwing his hands through the ball. If Shivnarine Chanderpaul - the man who the word 'unorthodox' was invented for* - were English, he'd have no chance at the top level. We'd have seen Murali and Johan Botha thrown on the scrapheap years ago (though Botha may be ending up there all by himself anyway).

It seems like England forgot individuality many years ago and just wants a side made up of eleven automatons. Whither England's Sehwag? Probably having that irritating tendency of being unpredictably brilliant and infuriating in equal measure coached out of him in Australia.


* - See also Paul Adams.