Playing Style
McCool had a round-arm bowling action, releasing the ball with his arm almost parallel to the ground. Before he developed problems with the skin on his spinning finger, he was, in spite of his unorthodox action, able to generate sharp spin. The cricket writer, Jack Pollard said of McCool, " was almost unplayable on badly prepared pitches, so wide and sharp was the turn of his leg-breaks." and that he "made even State batsmen look inept". On the advice of coaches and ex-players, McCool attempted to alter his action to a more orthodox style on several occasions but always returned to his natural style.
A short man but with a strong build, as a batsman he was a vigorous hooker and a wristy cutter, scoring mostly square of the wicket. He was particularly good against spin bowling, even on difficult pitches.
During his time at Somerset, he was known for " a match with his cracking strokes in an hour." Alan Gibson wrote: "We hardly think of him as a stylist, and he was mostly a back-foot player, getting the greater number of his runs in the segments fanning out from point and square-leg. But he was enjoyable to watch, compact, tidy, combining powerful hitting with delicate placing. In the best Somerset tradition, he was always after the bowling, and in the best Australian tradition, he always relished a fight." But he also adapted his style to suit English pitches: in an early innings for Somerset, he was out trying to hook a ball from Trevor Bailey. "The hook, he decided, was a stroke to be used sparingly on English pitches... McCool was constantly amending his technique that season, whenever he spotted a flaw in his method. Again and again he held the Somerset batting together. Nothing in his previous experience had equipped him for the task of holding up a losing side in a damp English summer."
He was renowned for his catching, often spending an hour at a time practising catching a ball thrown into the side of a roller normally used to prepare the cricket pitch. Journalist and former team-mate Bill O'Reilly said after McCool's death in 1986: "If Colin had played in the last 10 years, he would have been regarded as one of the greatest all-rounders ever in Australian cricket. He was a great batsman, a wonderful bowler and one of the best slips fieldsmen I have ever seen."
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