Читать книгу Cricket My Way - Ian Botham, Ian Botham - Страница 9

THE GRIP

The most important part of batting is for a batsman to find out for himself the most comfortable way of holding the bat and standing at the crease. Grip, stance and back-lift are the key to everything, and if they are not mastered, the rest of batting becomes more and more difficult.

There are one or two golden rules, but not half as many as the average coaches say. If they were right then everyone would hold the bat and stand at the crease in exactly the same way.

But they don’t – just think for instance of the different stances of Peter Willey and Graham Gooch. Or Viv Richards and me, Mike Gatting and Allan Lamb, and so on. They have all worked out what suits them best, but although there are huge differences, certain basic details are common, and it is these I want to explain.

The orthodox grip should always have both hands together on the handle. Any photographs of me batting, whether hitting the ball hard and high or, much more rarely, playing defensively, invariably show how close together both hands are.

Ideally they should not be either at the very top or bottom of the handle, but if that makes you feel more comfortable, then don’t be put off by a coach telling you to move them up or down.

If they stay together, there is a much better chance of them working together under the guiding control of the top hand, rather than letting the bottom hand take over.

Obviously the higher up the handle the hands are, the wider the arc that is created for the bat to swing through, and some batsmen move to the top later in an innings, when they are trying to accelerate.

Even if the hands are at the very bottom of the handle, although some power might be lost, there is a compensatory increase in control because the bat has effectively shortened. This is what golfers do when they sometimes ‘choke down’ on a particular club to tighten up control. Sticking with golf, the driver is the most difficult club in the bag to control, because it is the longest club; so always remember that the nearer the top the hands are, the greater will be the power factor – but at the expense of a little bit of control.

So don’t hold it at the top, just because your particular hero does. I am pretty near the top – not quite all the way – simply because from the time I developed my first and only grip, that is what suited me best, and nobody tried to change me.

Once Ken Hibbert found out I naturally got hold of the bat in a reasonably correct way, he left me alone; so as soon as a batsman finds out by trial and error what suits him best, he must stay with it.

Of course, some good players do have their hands apart, but as with any successful orthodoxy, the batsman concerned succeeds in spite of, and not because of, any particular quirk.

Derek Randall comes to mind. He built a fine career with a grip based on his hands being further apart than any other top player I can remember. It helped his great strength of cutting, because that stroke is entirely governed and controlled by the bottom hand. But he could still drive with the best of them because he had the ability to relax the bottom hand and let the top hand take over when he attacked on the front foot.

Derek is a good example of how slavishly rigid coaching would have ruined a potential England player – what fun we would have missed!

Sport is choc-full of performers who apparently defy all the rules, and yet still deliver the goods. Lee Trevino in golf and Alex Higgins in snooker apparently ignore the coaching manuals in much of what they do, but look at the results they have produced. Much of their set-up and preparation seems all wrong, but in spite of that, everything is right at the moment of impact through the ball; and cricket is no different. As long as the bat is accelerating straight through the line of the ball at impact, it really doesn’t matter how you arrive there.