Quotes of the Day

To explain why he's worried about cricket's future, Greg Chappell must first hark back to his past. So, over lunch in a Sydney restaurant, he describes the Adelaide backyard where he and his brothers contested their fierce "Tests" - played always, at the insistence of their father, with a hard ball. Other times, with local boys, they'd set up stumps at the park around the corner or at the beach, where they chose between two types of pitch - fast (the hard sand) or a subcontinental turner (the soft stuff). These games could go for hours, like sessions of the various solo bat-and-ball activities that young Greg would settle for sometimes.

It's fair to say that all the Chappell boys kicked on in their cricket. Trevor played three Tests; Australia has had no shrewder captain than Ian. Greg became a batting maestro, retiring in 1984 after scoring more than 7,000 Test runs at a superlative average against some of the most fearsome bowlers the game has seen. But just why he could play as well as he did is something he believes he grasped only recently. Those carefree boyhood games, he argues, amounted to more than just mucking about; they were the making of him.

For Chappell, that theory and others have coalesced into a conviction: Australia's national game is headed for strife. His reasoning goes like this. Life in the suburbs, in those precious hours between school and dinner, has changed. If they're not trekking home from distant schools, kids are more likely to be clutching a video-game controller than a bat. For many, their only experience of cricket is in its most structured forms, at the nets (where the coach may be barking at them) or in matches (where the pressure's on). For the gifted, more impediments lie ahead in the form of degree-brandishing coaches. "This is the antithesis of how I learned to play," Chappell says. "And it's not just a little bit wrong - it's totally down the wrong path."

That path is littered, Chappell claims, with disaffected kids who are "leaving the sport in droves." Playing standards, he adds, are declining at many levels. The knee-jerk retort - What could be wrong with a system that's kept Australian teams at the peak of world cricket since the mid '90s? - is "simplistic," he says: the consequences of what's happening will soon reach the top, and dynasties can crumble. The West Indies were dominant in the '80s, but cricket there is now languishing, as it is to varying degrees and for different reasons in England, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe, where Australia begins a two-Test series on May 22. "I'm not trying to be a doomsayer," Chappell says. "But if Australia were to take a dive, cricket would be in serious trouble."

Some 436,000 people play organized cricket in Australia, and junior numbers have been stable for the past five years, says Cricket Australia. But like most sports, cricket loses a disproportionate number of players in their early teens. Many of these could be retained, Chappell argues, if cricket went easier on them. It needs to realize that without a backyard initiation, many kids are finding the real thing too hard. They need to be held back from competition so they can devote at least "their first 100 hours of (cricketing) activity to triggering intuitive learning." Coaches are trying to compensate with intensive teaching, but bombarding tyros with instruction is counterproductive because it transforms what could be an effortless process into a chore. There's a better way, says Chappell, who applied it inadvertently to his younger son 15 years ago. Pestered by Jonathan for cricket lessons, Chappell conducted them on the family tennis court, where the boy's goal was to score 100 and the father's was to get him there as fast as possible. At first, Chappell would toss a ball toward the 8-year-old and encourage him simply to "see it and hit it." As Jonathan improved, Chappell suggested targets at which to direct his strokes. "Within months he was playing shots - including forcing shots off the back foot - that I couldn't play until I was an adult," Chappell says. "His progress was incredible. And I hadn't taught him a thing." Perhaps, Chappell thought, Jonathan's ability was inherited. "But I've seen that rate of improvement too often since," he says, "in kids who don't have genetic advantages." (Jonathan was a standout in under-10s but grew bored with the game and quit it for baseball.)

The risks of overcoaching apply to older players, too, Chappell argues. In 1988, Ian Frazer was 22 when he became one of the first inductees into the Adelaide-based Cricket Academy, where the aim was to prepare the country's most promising talent for international competition. Frazer says he began his one-year stint "as someone who loved the game . . . Twenty months later I loathed it." What happened? The key to developing cricketers, Frazer says, is to give them "the right exposure at the right time." He'd reached a stage where he needed advice about touring and "self-management." What he got instead was time in the nets. Frazer walked away from cricket for five years and now collaborates with Chappell on a website aimed at fostering debate about cricket coaching.

Elite players? During a five-year term, which ended last year, as South Australia's state manager of cricket, Chappell was alarmed to see what practice involved for them. If they weren't perfunctorily engaged in the nets they were doing reductional drills - targeting one segment of a movement. Many of today's cricketers, Chappell suspects, don't know how it feels to be immersed in practice. But is he seriously suggesting they should be playing at the beach? "Absolutely. They should be doing a lot more game-scenario training, something that challenges them in ways the nets don't."

Scientists "have captured the sport," Chappell says. Though he acknowledges their theorizing has its benefits, he believes it's being misused. Of biomechanics expert John Harmer, a coach at Cricket Australia's Centre of Excellence in Brisbane, Chappell says: "I've heard John (give lectures) and he's brilliant. Everything makes sense. But coaches think, 'Wasn't that great!' and they go away and try to teach it to kids, who don't understand it" and shouldn't be thinking about it anyway.

In the cricket establishment there's respect for Chappell but a feeling he's overstating the issues. His thesis isn't bulletproof. Backyard cricket is less common than it was but it's hardly disappeared. As for coaches bewildering kids with instruction, junior coaching ranks are still filled mostly by players' dads, whose main concern each Saturday is that everyone have a turn. Some boys are quitting cricket because they're not very good at it, but Australian boys have been doing that for more than 150 years. And it has to be expected that some gifted players will fall away later, since talent is just one prerequisite for stardom. As Chappell's brother Ian once told this writer: "I'm often asked to look at a player and say whether I think he has what it takes. So I watch the kid and I might say, 'Well, yes, he's got the ability, but what I don't know yet is what's in his head and what's in his heart.' To make it, you need all three." A former colleague of Chappell's, South Australian general manager of cricket Harvey Jolly, sees a heightened risk of the "fire going out" in some youngsters because of the way cricket training has evolved. But he doubts there's cause for alarm. Nearly all of the game's senior coaching positions are still held by former first-class cricketers, he says, and while some youngsters might be startled when technicians hook them up for biomechanical analysis, "it's not to the extent where they think they're laboratory rats."

The actions of bowlers as young as 13 are analyzed in this way, says Cricket Australia's general manager for game development, Ross Turner. But the goal is less to enhance performance than to fulfill a "duty of care" - to identify glitches that might lead to injury. Then again, many players have been helped by the kind of coaching Chappell is skeptical about. South Australian fast bowler Shaun Tait, a 21-year-old on the verge of Test selection, says he was "raw" until a few years ago, when analysis of his action transformed his bowling: "It's made me quicker, more accurate and less likely to break down." Coach Harmer says the last thing he wants is to be an adversary of Chappell, whose ideas have "huge merit." But like all sports, cricket benefits from the "unpicking of champions" - seeking the reasons for their greatness in the minutiae of their techniques.

What makes it hardest for many people to share Chappell's concerns is not just that the Australian team is dominant but that it has many players - Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden, Glenn McGrath - whose styles are so simple. Ah, Chappell says, but they're remnants of the old way. "There are exceptions. Some kids are so gifted they'll come through despite the system. My argument is not about where we are as much as where we'll be in 10 years. We've changed tack dramatically in the last decade, (toward) methodology that has no track record." For all the challenges he overcame as a player, Chappell has faced none more daunting than reversing a trend most people regard as progress.

• Daniel Williams
• Legend Ian Chappell says the game's being taught all wrong