Crafty Cottam helps bring ray of light to the England attack (19 December 1998)

19 December 1998

Crafty Cottam helps bring ray of light to the England attack

By Christopher Martin-Jenkins

HOWEVER much has gone wrong for England on tour so far, observers are unanimous that there has been a genuine improvement in the bowling.

In part, this is based on the emergence of Alex Tudor into a Test cricketer at the age of 21, although it would be unwise to invest too much hope just yet on the evidence of one match on the fastest pitch in the world. The four-day match against the Australian 2nd XI starting in Hobart today, only Tudor's third first-class game of the tour, will give another indication of his progress.

The improvement of the remainder, however, in achieving greater accuracy without any loss of guile or menace, cannot be a coincidence. Everything points to valuable work by the new bowling coach, Bob Cottam.

Fifty-four now and walking, thanks to a gammy knee, with less fluency than he did as a tall right-arm fast-medium bowler for Hampshire and Northamptonshire in the 1960s and 70s, Cottam has managed what the coaches brought in by Ray Illingworth in the last England regime could not, namely to bridge the generation gap.

Part of the secret seems to be that he makes bowlers work out new ideas and minor adjustments for themselves, rather than foisting old ideas upon them.

Cottam is positive, enthusiastic, friendly and forthright. He talks his bowlers up, without harbouring any rose-tinted illusions. He is not blinkered about the opposition either: "Mc Grath's wrist is steady as a rock and Fleming's a brilliant bowler, too. He could be a world beater if he had an extra yard."

Cottam knows his craft inside out and he has a good eye for a bowler's faults and strengths. The wonky knee is the penalty for 15 years of hard bowling and 1,010 first-class wickets, although taking 100 wickets in three different seasons gained him no more than a couple of the less popular overseas trips - to India and Pakistan - and a mere four Test caps. Given the conditions he was bowling in, 14 Test wickets at a cost of 23 runs each are fine figures. A hostile competitor, whose height enabled him to get bounce, he developed the ability to cut the ball either way off the seam when the conditions demanded.

He works now on two aspects of each bowler's skill: the basic action and the subtler arts of what they actually do with the ball. Fast bowlers who have taken relatively easy wickets on seaming pitches in county cricket often have to learn painfully on Test pitches that an ability to move the ball is essential. But Cottam treads softly with what he calls the engine room of the team, building among all of them a camerarderie and a friendly rivalry with the batsmen: "the Brylcreem boys I call them".

He is at his best, naturally, with the seam bowlers but he has worked effectively with the spinners, too, and has a high regard for Peter Such's tenacity. Shortly before his sudden promotion in Adelaide, Such was being struck for three sixes in a practice match by the opening batsman for St Kevin's School.

"Suchie said the ball was coming out right, and the sixes would probably have been caught on a bigger ground, so I wasn't worried," Cottam recalls. "I kept telling him that if he kept working hard he could be back in the side. You never know."

Recently he has persuaded Ben Hollioake, disappointingly a passenger on the tour so far, to cut his run-up by 10 paces and he hopes that Angus Fraser will come to the conclusion of his own accord that he, too, should be running in less far.

Perhaps Fraser needs the long run to get impetus at the crease, as a jumbo requires a long runway, but on this tour he has not always attacked the crease, as opposed to just putting the ball there.

With most of the bowlers, Cottam sees his role as fine-tuning. Dean Headley bowled six no-balls in each innings in the Adelaide Test but the device of using whitewash to mark out a small box a few yards into his run-up has helped him to cut down on wasted balls.

Other bowlers have a follow-through marker in practice on which to line up their leading arms, like golfers eyeing a particular point to keep themselves straight off the tee.

Cottam's job is likely to get harder when the one-day games start but he is especially pleased with the two fastest bowlers, Tudor and Darren Gough, and he would get immense satisfaction if they could roll Australia over cheaply in one of the four Test innings which remain.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)