Book 14 - Beyond a Boundary pt 2

Beyond a Boundary is a work of recollection, an oldish man looking back at his obsession with cricket: integrating his own memories with things he learnt from other sources. He started it at some point in the 1950s but when it was published in 1963 he was 62, so the  descriptions of single strokes seen when he was a young boy, the cut of Arthur Jones for example, are images that had been with him for decades. I find this remarkable and can only wish my memory was so vivid and I had such clarity but the book makes clear can only happen with early and rigorous training. Cricket filled his mind and tested his body from a young age.  “I was reading cricket and looking at it so critically so early that casual experiences which would have passed unnoticed stayed with me and I worked on them as if on some historical problem” (p47).

He played the game to a high standard and although he played with some of the great players he described in the book he had the awareness to know he was not quite good enough. “ By the time I left school at the age of eighteen I was a good defensive bat and could have held my own at any English public school side. I could bowl fast-medium with a high action, swing the ball late from leg and break it with shoulder and finger action from off”(p45). “I had bowing gifts and they could have been developed but the pace, the length, the command, the stamina, the concentration, I did not have and never had. Now and then even I could bring it off for an over or two. The great gain was that it taught me how to watch.” (p47). This is the reason the book is so good. He understands what he sees on a cricket pitch, can work out the subtleties of the ebb and flow of fortune, can see the angles and know what is being attempted yet knows that the game is mostly in the mind  and as such also reveals character. In the same way that the best football managers were often not the best players, the most insightful writers on sport need not have played at the highest level.  They just need to have played enough to recognise what is going on and have an obsessive curiosity about what they are watching.

One of the great pleasure of the book is the analytical description of West Indian cricketers from a bygone era. As I read some of the names meant something: Learie Constantine and Frank Worrell. George Headley rang a bell but Wilton St Hill and George John were completely unknown. About all of them though there was personal insight. Constantine was obviously a man of virtue as well as a great cricketer and was of great help to James in building his career and so we learn of his character as well as his prowess. George Headley though is talked about purely in terms of his greatness as a batsman and what it was that set him apart:

Great batsmen are the same, they are not like you or me. An experience is automatically registered and henceforth functions as a permanent part of the organism.
Similarly with placing. For George, to make a stroke was to hit the ball (he had loud scorn for ‘the pushers’) and to hit it precisely in a certain place.. He couldn’t think of a stroke without thinking of exactly where it was going. Whenever he scored a century and runs were not urgent he practised different strokes at the same ball, so as to be sure to command the placing of the ball where there was no fiejdsman… This placing to a shifting field must also be to a substantial degree automatic. Having taken glance round and sized up what the bowler is trying to do, the great batsman puts the ball away more by reflex than conscious action (p188)

But that reflex took a lot of conscious effort. The night before a Test Headley would rarely sleep more than an hour or two. he spent the time visualising how he would play his innings and mentally rehearse his shots. A lot of modern sports psychology extols the benefits of pre-visualisation but it is not a new discovery. It is one of the pleasures of reading older books to discover that it is not a new thing.  This book shows, above everything else, how hard people have always thought about the game and who everyone James wrote about had their own profound insights.