Keep It Simple, Sport

My brother reckons that the best piece of coaching he ever received came from an affable bloke called Bill Wawn, who in the early 1980s in Sydney looked after a team of useful teenaged cricketers. Padded up and nervous one Saturday afternoon, my brother and his batting partner were about to head out to the middle to chase a challenging target when Bill sauntered over. "All right, boys, no silly buggers," he said. "But if the ball's there to be hit, lay the wood into it." And that was it. Short. Simple. Kind of funny in a way that's hard to...