There appear to be hardly any beginners or habitual players who know how to profit by seeing experts at play and at work. The reason cannot well be that we do not look on at games sufficiently often! No, one reason is that we have not been trained to observe with a view to personal experimentation afterwards; and another reason is that there is very little time to catch and realise the different positions and movements as they flash by. Hence the value of photographs, especially when they are—as many of these thirty-four are—taken from behind: it is not easy to reproduce for ourselves the action as shown by an ordinary photograph (taken from in front), since it gives us everything the wrong way round.

But even photographs often fail to teach their lesson. The learner must be told how to teach himself from photographs. After which he will find it easy to teach himself from actual models, as soon as he knows just what to look out for—the feet and their “stances” and changes, and so on. It is to be hoped that these photographs, and the notes on them, and the obvious inferences drawn from them, will train readers to study various other experts besides these three, who are only a few out of a host.

For the object of the book is not to tie any player down to any one method, but rather to set him on the track of independent research and self-instruction: to show him how to watch and see, and how to practise the best things that he sees, and what the best things are most likely to be. Not a single hint in these pages need be followed until the reader is convinced that what I advise is what most if not all great players actually do, whether consciously or by instinct.

The volume is not intended to compete with the many excellent books edited by those who themselves play the game well. It boasts of a large debt to these classics, but having gathered hints from them it moves away on altogether different lines. The best player is seldom the best teacher of average beginners. On the principle of “Set a thief to catch a thief,” a duffer has here been set to teach a duffer, while at the same time the whole teaching is, I hope, strictly according to the actual play of good players, as shown by observation, by photographs, and by answers to questions asked during special interviews. The three chief players (whose ascertained positions and movements are made the basis for all the simple lessons offered here) are Abel, Hirst, and Shrewsbury.

The editor of this volume used to play Cricket at school about as well or as badly as he used to play Racquets. After his school and undergraduate days at Cambridge, he discovered many fundamental faults in his play at Racquets—faults which abundant practice had strengthened and fixed into bad habits—ineradicably and hopelessly bad habits, his critics said. He had some hints from the best professionals (Smale, Latham, and others); he studied their positions and movements carefully; then, chiefly by the help of certain easy and healthy exercises in his bedroom for less than five minutes a day (Mr. Edward Lyttelton constantly recommends bedroom-practice for Cricket, and quotes the success of Jupp thereby), he found that he was gradually removing those habits, and building better habits which persisted in subsequent play in the Court itself. Quite recently, after noticing the various positions and movements of the great experts of Cricket (including the three professionals whose photographs appear in this volume), he concluded that there had been remarkably similar faults, and no less fundamental faults, in his Cricket, though of course the games of Cricket and Racquets have marked differences. He thinks that these faults were amply sufficient to account for his past failure to enjoy Cricket (that is, to improve at Cricket), just as the other faults had proved sufficient to account for his past clumsiness at Racquets. He therefore devised special exercises by which he might eventually be enabled to do himself less injustice at Cricket also.[1] These he intends to practise regularly in order to secure the bodily mechanisms of play, to make them his very own, before he once again meets those “disturbing elements” in Cricket (as in Racquets and Tennis), the ball and the opponents.

Whether he will ever become a cricketer or not he cannot say—he does not expect to become one in less than a year or two: so numerous and deeply ingrained were his mistakes, so execrable was his style, if he is to believe his most candid friends and enemies! But at least he can safely say that these mistakes—which he observes to be common to nearly all duffers and most beginners—are now so absolutely obvious as to supply ample reasons for any amount of his failure in all kinds of batting, in all departments of fielding, as well as in bowling. He can safely say that until he has mastered those positions and movements which nearly all the experts already have as a matter of course, until he has learnt the A B C, built the scaffolding, formed the skeleton, or whatever one likes to call the process, he will certainly not become a cricketer. He cannot reasonably expect the tree to bear fruit for a long time yet; but he hopes the fact that he himself is practising what he preaches will encourage others to give the method—sensibly adapted according to their individual opinions and needs and models—a fair and square trial, as thousands have already given a fair and square and successful trial to the simpler diet. The method is urged as claiming a reasonable experiment before condemnation: that is all. It is not meant to harass and cramp all players, so as to make them uniform, any more than the learning of the alphabet and of spelling is meant to harass and cramp all writers. He only describes what he believes to be the correct alphabet and spelling of words in Cricket. Out of this alphabet and these words let each player subsequently form his own sentences and paragraphs and chapters. Let each player develop to the full his individual merits and specialities. But not until he has made the alphabet and the vocabulary his very own, to use easily at will, is he likely to develop his individuality satisfactorily and successfully, any more than a builder would be likely to build a good house without good bricks, mortar, and wood, and some knowledge and practice of the best ways of using them.

The suggestions are one and all based upon the practice or the teaching of successful players. Of the three special models here, not one has the advantage of superior height, and at least one had not the advantage of athletic physique. The instructions point out the apparent foundations of batting, bowling, and fielding, and, by contrast, the apparent faults to which the natural duffer like myself is liable. It is hoped that critics and other readers will kindly offer every possible hint and correction.

Each true lover of games, whether he play or watch or both watch and play, must see that if this way be good—this mastery of the instruments of play, in addition to the usual net-practice and games—it surely will improve the health and physique of the nation; will bring in more recruits for Cricket; will enable the busy man to keep up at least his muscular, if not his nervous apparatus, so that he need never get considerably out of practice or training, and need never, as too many thousands have done, give up the game merely because he has not time to play the game itself regularly. The editor feels assured that any feasible five-minutes-a-day system like this, which may tend to spread the greatest of games more widely, and to raise our national standard of skill, enjoyment, and physique, will be received by every patriot in the spirit in which it is offered; namely, as perhaps useful for most, and probably healthy and harmless for all. Every sensible person will agree that if the game is going to be played at all—and it certainly is—then it is worth playing well, and therefore worth learning well and practising well.

Whether these exercises and general hints will help towards my end—towards a game better played all-round (in batting, bowling, and fielding), better watched, and so better enjoyed—experience must decide. But all will concede that these exercises are not less pleasant and wholesome than those of drill and dumb-bell and strain-apparatus; that they are far better adapted than these are as a preparation for the noblest of sports and for much of daily life itself, since they encourage not mere strength and vastness of muscle, but also full extensions in various directions, promptitude to start in any required direction, rapidity to carry the movements through, endurance to repeat them, self-control to keep or recover poise in spite of the fulness and rapidity and promptitude and unforeseenness of the motion; to say nothing of the corresponding mental and moral excellences. If the system demands only a few minutes each day then in so far as it is correct—and it will be gradually corrected as observations and criticisms pour in—it will prove well worth while, especially on wet days (which are not unknown in England), and in winter, for those who do not grudge many hours a day to Cricket itself with all its waitings and watchings and disappointments.

The system is the chief new feature of this book, which, however, does not by any means underestimate the equally essential coaching by schoolmasters and professionals and others, and net-practice and practice-games as an addition to the system and as the test of its merits or demerits.

These ought we to do, and not leave the other—the system which teaches this very alphabet of Cricket—undone, especially to-day when the majority of people are cooped up in cities without the chance of a practice-game or even of a net. The plea is not for uniformity of style, but for reasonable mastery of the spelling of words before we write essays; for a system of self-teaching and self-correction; for a system of training and practice when regular play is out of the question; for a drill which fathers and uncles may teach their children and nephews; for a healthy and interesting use of odd minutes which would otherwise be wasted or worse than wasted.