With another English cricket season having just concluded, I wanted to mark the occasion by describing how the game highlights two contrasting symptoms of my dyspraxia.
I’ve described my love of cricket before, which I appreciate may not land as well with readers in, say, the US or Canada. (I guess North American readers could translate ‘cricket’ to ‘baseball’.) I explained, for example, in my blog on dyspraxia and sport how I’ve never been able to play cricket at even a half-decent level due to an inability to master the seemingly simple art of throwing a ball overarm – rendering me completely incapable of fielding, a skill required of all eleven players.
This inability to throw overarm is a classic example of what I describe as a visible symptom of DCD – one that would immediately strike an outside observer. However, my cricketphilia also throws up another feature of my dyspraxic experience: an invisible symptom.
In cricket, the fielding team arranges its players into a complex constellation of strangely-named positions such as deep square leg, silly point, first, second, third, and fourth slip – and even cow corner (don’t ask!). Naturally, the majority of batters are right-handed, so my mind's eye picture of named fielding positions is locked into that orientation. But when a left-handed batter comes to the crease – like the elegant David Gower, who graced my team, Hampshire – the entire field becomes a mirror image.
Exacerbating matters, when a left-handed batter is paired at the other end of the wicket with a right-handed partner – as per Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett during England’s recent Stokes-McCullum era – rotation of strike triggers an immediate inversion of the field. My brain has to perform a minute-by-minute mental reconfiguration just to keep track of where everyone is standing and what those positions are called as the batting pair swap ends.
This is one of those classic instances where my visual-spatial processing is always half a mile behind everyone else’s. I have to pause and actively compute where a position like ‘mid-off’ is located for a left-hander. This isn't due to a lack of familiarity; it happens despite a love of the game that dates back to the late 1980s, when cricket on the BBC was an integral part of my childhood summers alongside Wimbledon tennis, trips to Hampshire’s beaches, and eating an insane amount of ice cream.
The moral of the story is simple: if you have a dyspraxic friend, relative, colleague, or teammate, remember that their visible difficulties are only one half of the picture. The other is the constant, silent effort of mental mapping and spatial navigation that most people take entirely for granted – but which saps us dyspraxics of energy.
