Ted Dexter Current Opinion and Memories

Television replays and highlights programmes are a godsend to those of us who have the odd hour or two on our hands in retirement. There has been quite a rash of “ look back at the Ashes“ programmes, presumably generated in the UK, concentrating on England's recent victories. Good fun they are too, watching the old enemy suffering anguish rather than the other way round.
Now the Australians seem to be getting their own back, reverting to their own glory days with Shane Warne and Michael Slater dishing it out to the Poms with ball and bat. The man who caught my technical eye, however, was Steve Waugh with his trademark “square cutting” much in evidence.
Three things struck me, all concerning his foot movements: how far across he moved to cover the line of the ball, how far back he went and how he always kept his back foot strictly parallel to the crease. It was text book stuff from someone who was never considered the most elegant of players. Not that anyone doubted his basic skills.
Many of the moderns spend much of the time with both toes pointing up the pitch and it surprises me how often they seem to “get away with it”. But , if you think about it, it is virtually impossible to make a good move back and across unless the back foot is pointing in the direction you are going.
I wonder whether the Australian skipper Clarke had been watching the same clips, because it was early in his monumental knock of 329 that Mark Nicholas divulged the notion that the “parallel” back foot position was something he had been trying to master in practise. I was certainly taught that way as a nine year old by the martinet Headmaster – in fact all the young at my school were told to point the back foot to gully – or else!!
Apart from improving the range of your footwork, it tends to keep the upper body sideways at the same time (another old coaching tenet) and it was a treat to watch Laxman playing so fluently in the Indian second innings as a result of excellent left shoulder and forearm control of the bat. There are undoubtedly new elements in the game including reverse swing and the finger spinners ability to run the ball the “other” way, but for the most part the old adages of how best to play the game have stood the test of time.
Another instance of old fashioned virtues being “reinvented” was the theory that the Australian bowling coaches were responsible for the better length and line of the Australian quicks . Moving the emphasis across to off stump and OUTSIFE OFF seemed to be the order of the day – or in the words of Geoffrey Boycott, into the “corridor of uncertainty”. It seemed like this was a new theory and a new dawn. Maybe it is not so new after all – as I will explain.
By chance I sat next to an eminent landscape artist, specialising in gardens who happened to mention a distant ancestor who played for Nottinghamshire and England. He turned out to be a certain William Attewell who enjoyed a long and successful career 1881-1890. Of 429 matches, 10 were in England colours. Bowling medium pace he took nearly 2000 wickets at an average of 15. He was extremely economical (1.65 runs fer over) and had a strike rate of 55 balls per wicket.
Now comes the crunch. In a short profile it reads “ he used his abilities to perfect OFF THEORY, popular at the time, frustrating the batsmen, bowling to a packed off-side field. There are few new things under the sun they say and certainly not in cricket.