John Lever, the former England bowler, will give Bermuda’s cricketers the benefit of his vast experience this weekend.

Lever, who is on the Island to play in today’s Alan Oliver Memorial Golf Tournament as a guest of local charity, YouthNet, will help coach the Bermuda under-19 squad on Sunday.

A left-arm swing bowler, who played 21 Test matches for England and in 22 One-Day Internationals in the 1970s and Eighties, Lever has spent the better part of the past 25 years coaching at Bancroft’s School in the UK, while also working part-time with England bowlers Chris Woakes and Steven Finn, and several county sides.

Lever, however, will not be trying to make any wholesale changes to the way the Bermuda players bat, or bowl, bar rectifying any glaring problems, rather he sees his role as more of a tinkerer.

“If these kids have had a structure in their coaching, you can’t go in and say ‘don’t do that, do this’,” Lever said. “I’m a great believer in tinkering, you change things when they’re nine, ten, 11, these guys have got to a certain level, they’ve got there because of their action, or perhaps of the way that they play with the bat.

“So, with the batting side of things you talk about patience and how they are going to score their runs. If there is a glaring weakness, if they are on the front foot before the bowler has let it go, or not moving their feet to get into line, there is something to be said there.

“But, nine times out of ten, they know how to play, it is just a matter of teaching them how to score runs when they are out in the middle, how to spend time in the middle.”

Lever’s arrival has come at the perfect time for the under-19s, they are scheduled to work on game related situations at Bailey’s Bay, if the weather cooperates. The lessons that Lever will teach this weekend are not necessarily technical ones; responsibility, intelligence, and game management, are all essential parts of the game.

“When you’re in the middle, [it is] your responsibility to win that game, your responsibility to be there at the end,” Lever said. “One of the biggest problems in cricket is getting the batsman to up the rate without them trying to hoick it out of the ground.

“Upping the rate does not mean you have to smack a boundary, it doesn’t. You work the ball around, you put people under pressure. But as soon as they [the batsman] start to go big they lose their shape, they get out, and somebody has got to come in and they are going to go at two [runs] an over and you’ve lost momentum.

“In all the top chases, [if] you lose momentum, it’s very hard to get it back.”

It might be almost 30 years since Lever sent a ball down in anger, and while the game has changed since the days of a good West Indies Test team, the basics have not. In helping Woakes and Finn, and a host of others, Lever, who took ten wickets against India on his Test debut, understands the issues that all bowlers face, from having a go-to dot ball, to dealing with the intimidation of a high-scoring batsman.

“It’s putting enough dot balls together, to build up pressure, to get a wicket if it’s a flat, flat wicket,” Lever said. “And the pressure of bowling to a Viv Richards, a Graham Gooch, is still there, the intimidation factor, to run up and put the ball in the right place to them.

“I’ve stood at the other end to Goochie and the ball has been flying past my nose, and then he gets down the other end and the ball is up and he’s smacked it for four. They [bowlers] were just scared to bowl at him.

“I’ve been in that situation [as a bowler] and it’s a horrible feeling, because you’re back at your mark thinking ‘where am I going to put it’, there is a tendency then to just run in and let it go and try and get the over out of the way.

“You’ve got to stop, you’ve got to think. Make it look as though you’ve got some sort of plan, because that bloke at the other end with the 3lb bat is in control at the moment, it’s all mind games.”

Lever knows that ability to think about the game as it progresses is ultimately the difference between the good players and the great ones. It is also why he understands the need for video analysis and dislikes it all at the same time.

“When I was in the Middlesex dressing room you had your video man and at the end of that morning session, press one button, and the bowler can see every ball that’s he’s bowled on a pitch map,” he said. “That use to annoy me, because they were making mistakes in that morning session, and it didn’t get corrected until they had come off, and they had done that.

“To me, any good bowler, any top bowler, is going to know where he should be bowling that ball, after bowling two balls, I would hope that I knew where to bowl [on a certain type of wicket].”