The best coach: self-help

It was a long learning curve in that sun-filled summer. Playing six days a week, you had to pick up something. The most important lesson on that 1949 tour was during the second game against Yorkshire. He had gone across the road at Headingley to the academy and into the nets to sort out a backlift problem. Up bounced a cheerful dapper, if aging man in whites. At first he though he was a net attendant.

‘‘Can I be of some help?’’ was the enquiry.

‘‘Yes, I need someone to help me with my backlift’’, Reid explained. ‘‘Well, as all the bowlers are busy, I’ll bowl you a few and we’ll see what is wrong’’, was the response.

Reid was bemused. Someone old enough to be a grandfather offering to bowl and pass on advice. At that moment, the old timer said something to one of the bowlers in the other net about shoulder and body swing. The first ball was on a length, and curving into the legs. As Reid recalled, it had him scrambling.

Within 10 minutes, granddad was telling Reid that his footwork had turned him square on. It was soon sorted out to get him facing sideways. He thanked the old man and went to the balcony for a quite soft drink.

‘‘You do know who that is’’, asked Mervyn Wallace, the Kiwi vice-captain and the young all-rounder’s mentor that tour. ‘‘George Hirst, Yorkshire and England all-rounder, and former Eton College coach.’’

The name meant nothing to Reid. So Wallace enlightened him. One of the game’s all-time greats, a shrewd judge of technique: a first-class record of 36,203 runs and 2,727 wickets for 21 seasons. He was 78 at the time.

Two years later, when he signed a Lancashire League contract, Reid learnt that, among other duties, he was expected to coach the team. His memory of that afternoon in the Yorkshire Academy sent him off on a journey that partly changed his life. If he was to be a success, he needed the advice of the man Len Hutton said was the best coach in England.

During the tours of South Africa (1953/54) and Pakistan (1955/56), Reid took it on himself to help coach in the nets. In 1958 he led a team of ‘babies’ to England and pleaded for Wallace to travel as deputy manager and act as coach. Not a chance. It meant extra money.

His argument was if the counties and MCC when on tour employed coaches, what was wrong with doing the same? The response: get on with playing the game. Soccer and rugby may have coaches, but not cricketers. Just not on, old boy.

Even provincial coaches were frowned on until the mid-1970s. But Australia, as usual, took the lead. Bobby Simpson, when taking over as Australian captain, was asked what he needed most. His response of a ‘organised coach’ set some administrators thinking and Sir Donald Bradman agreed the idea might by of assistance.

By the time of the first World Cup in 1975, most teams turned up with physical trainers; Australia had one who doubled as a coach. As television popularised the sport among the masses and techniques needed to move forward if teams were to become competitive, the coach was an integral part of the system.