Manack is at home here
Muhammad Manack feels at home whenever he has a bat in hand
Muhammad Manack is demanding that the cricketing world pay attention to him. In 2023, the 22-year-old bagged all the awards in the Lions Premier League. He showed flashes of brilliance in his debut Division One season, doing enough to be selected for the South Africa Emerging squad.
Muhammad Manack is at home here.
The above statement is both literal and figurative. The nets are at the back of their family home. They are wide enough to accommodate two batters at once. The concrete slab is around 16.5 yards, three-quarters of a standard pitch, and the matting is almost as long. There is a hole in the net on the left side of the non-striker's end. It's just big enough not to obstruct the camera.
The bowling machine was loaded and ready, but it wasn't firing balls just yet. He stood in his batting stance, sans bat, and did weight transfer drills. He repeated the movements with the bat in hand. Then he added the shot movement, batting through the shot as if he were facing deliveries. Manack looked like a 10-year-old learning a new skill. He wasn't 10, he was 21, but he was learning a shot.
Manack and his father, Hussein, agree that the shot over cover against spinners didn't come to him naturally. He was born with a preternatural ability to pick up length and a propensity to shovel everything to the leg side. His grandfather, father, and uncles played and still coach cricket. They passed down the cricket gene and helped him expand his range of shots.
By age 13, Manack could drive, cut, pull, and hook so well that St Stithians College lured him from King Edward VII School. Wim Jansen, the St Stithians Director of Cricket, saw potential in him. But it wasn't just Manack's natural inclination to the game that determined Jansen's decision. He saw passion. Manack was the type of youngster who would sleep with his bat.
Hussein hung a ball overhead in the backyard, and Manack spent hours hitting it. He roped in his cousins and friends into backyard Test matches. One time, their family went on a camping and fishing trip to the Vaal. Manack packed his bat and ball while Hussein packed fishing gear.
"We taped up some tennis balls for them to swing more, and then when we got there, there was like a road, a gravel road. We put some straw there, cut up some paper cups and put some on the landing strip to help the ball move a bit more," Manack explained.
The family was in the bush, while Manack was at home. He doesn't need much to feel at home, give him a bat, a ball and a batting surface and that's enough for him.
In 1994, historian Juliet Barker published a 1,003-page scholarship called The Brontës, the product of six years of curating the Brontë Parsonage Museum. According to Barker, the Brontë sisters and their brother, Branwell, were not literary geniuses as youngsters. However, they grew up in a home replete with books and magazines. They didn't just read them, they learned to write by imitating their content.
At one point, they wrote twenty-two little books, averaging eighty pages each in fifteen months. It didn't matter that the content wasn't of good quality; what mattered was the volume. They wrote a lot and learned a lot about writing as a result. It was the 10,000-hour theory in practice.
Like his father, Manack describes himself as a firm believer in the 10,000-hour rule. “When you are younger, you have to face a lot of balls; that’s the only way to develop your game,” he explained.
“Cricket is about muscle memory. You need to reach a point where your body takes over and plays the shot naturally, almost automatically, without you thinking about it. Like riding a bicycle, it becomes easy after you’ve done it many times. The trick is to develop muscle memory for every stroke you would like to play, and that requires repetition. Hours and hours of hitting thousands and thousands of balls,” Hussein elaborated.
At St Stithians, he had 6:00 am net sessions before attending lessons. Charles Coventry, his coach, indulged him and was almost always available to throw balls for him. When Coventry was otherwise occupied, Manack got a friend to feed him balls. He also had another session in the afternoon.
At home, his father did a lot of sidearm throwing, operated the bowling machine and did underarm and overarm throws for hours on end. When he was alone, Manack did one-handed hits on the hanging ball in the backyard. When he wasn't doing that or corralling friends and family for games, Manack turned up to training and matches for Marks Park CC.
When you grow up in a cricket-playing family, you learn the value of your wicket early on. Everyone is so good that they don’t go out easily. Manack didn’t enjoy outfield postings, so he learned to stay in the middle for as long as possible.
“An entertaining 30 or 40 is nice, but it also means that you sit on the sidelines for longer. When I was younger, my mindset was to spend as much time at the crease as possible. That is the only way to learn about yourself and your game, by working through different batters and changing match conditions,” Manack explained.
During their sojourn to the Vaal on a fishing trip, his family almost required an anchor to remove him. There was a bush on the legside, and hitting there was an automatic dismissal. There wasn't much to work with on the onside, and the best result came from hitting down the ground. So, that's what Manack did for hours.
That mindset paid off in March 2023. The Lions Colts were hurried off the pitch for a meagre 148 by the Titans Colts in a three-day contest. Matthew Kleinveldt’s century powered the Titans to 378. There was a day and a half left in the match when the Lions went in for their second innings.
The Titans needed 10 wickets to secure victory. The Lions’ chances for a win were slim, but they could avoid defeat if they batted through the remaining sessions. Manack dropped anchor and had accumulated 60 runs at stumps on the second day.
“The team required me just to bat for time and nothing else. They just needed me to occupy the crease, and that was going to win us the trophy or the competition. So, the next morning, I simplified things as much as possible by setting small goals,” Manack shared.
He is no stranger to small goals. He often puts a 10-run target for himself early in his innings to get his eye in. Against the Titans, his first goal was to reach the drinks break, then lunch. After that, his target was the post-lunch drinks break and then get to tea.
Manack batted to the final hour of play. He amassed 201 runs from 407 balls. There were only 10 overs left in the contest when he was dismissed. He would have battled to see out the day if his body had not been cramping. However, despite not batting through, his marathon innings was enough to secure a draw for his side.
“It is one of my favourite innings ever. It was the culmination of years of hard work,” Manack shared.
Learning a skill from the ground up is like trying to navigate an unfamiliar dark room. There is a lot of bumping into furniture whenever you try to move forward. You are forced to take several steps backwards before choosing an alternative route. It can be a painful and frustrating process.
Manack didn’t yield to the frustration. He maintained his focus.
“I am at a stage where mastery is the reason for my sessions. I am zoning into specific strengths and maybe trying to work on weaknesses,” Manack explained.
He kicked the ball back to Hussein. Father and son had moved on to a different part of his training session. They had just completed a drill where he dropped the ball for Manack to execute the shot over cover. Now he was throwing underarm balls to Manack.
Muhammad Manack stepped into each throw and executed the shot as if he were in the middle of the park. Manack has executed the shot in matches with varying success rates. He has also done this drill countless times. However, he was in no hurry to complete the session. Unlike during his younger years, when volume was the target, this was what experts call deep practice - the focus was on quality.
“The goal is to be an all-format cricketer, an all-format all-rounder. To get there, I need my skills to be on point. So, these days I try and keep my sessions specific. I used to do quite a lot when I was younger, I used to get a lot of quantity in and now obviously it's a fair amount of hours that I'm putting in, but a lot more quality than quantity,” Manack explained.
He executed the shot perfectly over the next few minutes, and then Hussein stopped. Manack’s last handful of strokes lacked the follow-through. The older Manack retrieved the camera. Father and son rewound the session, and they discussed what the young man was doing wrong.
“We have lots of cricket conversations, assessing and simulating match scenarios,” Hussein explained.
The session resumed and moved on to Manack facing the bowling machine. When they finally called it a day, hours had flown by and neither seemed to notice. It could have dragged on for a few more hours, and Manack wouldn’t have noticed or minded; he was at home, both literally and figuratively.