Ask the Readers: What Are You Working On?
We all know the benefits of purposeful practice, for players and for cricket coaches at every level. If you have no purpose, you have no reason to be at practice.
But that is easy to forget sometimes, especially when a net is running itself and everyone is getting a go. Things drift quickly. I want to prevent that so I want to know:
What are you working on right now?
Leave a comment in the comments box and let me know.
Not only is it good to share and a way to provide focus to your practice, it's also a way for me to get the temperature of PitchVision Academy readers. The more information you provide, the more I can tailor future content towards the areas that are of most interest to you.
So, be you a coach with a broad team focus, a player with a specific technical fault, or an administrator bent on reorganising the club, I want to hear your plans.
You can be a beginner, a potential test star or a club player.
For example, as I am based in the UK I am already formulating plans for winter training of my club Under 14 team, specifically what we want to achieve at indoor nets to prepare a young side for coming up against bigger and stronger boys. I'm also thinking about how we can better personalise senior training sessions, and for myself I am wondering how I can improve my batting while maintaining wicketkeeping standards. These are all early day planning stages that will get more specific after Christmas.
But this is not about me, it's about you. I'm especially interested in young cricketers in India or Pakistan experiences, but this is open to all. So...
Leave a comment and help PitchVision Academy to help you.
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Comments
Right now the sides I coach are focusing on game sense. Our season is half way through and i favour a focus on game sense rather than technical faults. We know what we have to do to win games of cricket and we are backing our techniques and playing to our strengths. As a general structure i tend to leave the off and pre season period for major technical work and ensuring our techniques are up to the standards we require. First half of the season i tend to build on technical aspects while gradually incorporating game sense. I then use the remainder of the season for game sense. It seems to work well
Having already gotten to a point where I am satisfied with the amount of spin I get on the ball, accuracy, variation etc. I am now doing my best to get match experience. It does happen quite often that I achieve amazing results in the beginning of the season, but towards the end they get worse. I'm trying to find a cause and solution for this, so I can sustain my performance right throughout the season.
One possible reason for my decreasing performances is the quality of practice I do in the off season, and the in season. During the off season I practice daily and 90% of that practice is without a batsman, for example target practice, flight drills etc. During the in season I practice at my school and club, the practice basically consists out of 3 nets with batsmen in them, and in a typical session each bowler bowls about 25 balls. In other words during the in season for four days a week I bowl approximately 75 less deliveries than usual per day. And to top that, I don't bowl my 25 deliveries consecutively, I bowl them at batsmen that just try to hit everything out of the park, and in the fear of getting hit all over the place I subconsciously drag deliveries shorter with less flight!
If I have a technical problem that I have to fix, a bucket of balls and one of those concrete slabs surrounded by green rope that they call "nets" can help me fix it in 10 minutes. A typical club net session will only worsen it and make it harder for me to fix it later.
There is no practice I enjoy more than bowling at a batsman for hours on end with no other bowlers or batsmen around. I can set him up for a dismissal for 60 balls before I strike the killer blow. But I lose all this when I have to bowl at a batsman who only faces 5 balls from me and if the other bowlers ( even the wicket-keeper bowls! Can you believe it ) are constantly bowling pressure-releavers!
The worst part is that I don't get a proper chance to practice my stock ball. Once the batsman sees what I'm bowling he just swings wildly the next ball, knowing what to expect. ( So I have to use a lot of variations ) Any balls that were miss hits that wouldn't even have gone past the infield I have to go and fetch. And of course, once I get back, the batsman is still there just waiting to smash the next ball.
I'm working on a solution for this (if there is a solution) and the best one I've come up with is to just forget there is a batsman and just keep bowling my stock ball no matter what. But there is nothing that crushes my ego more. And the batsmen are so vain when they hit me for a big shot, it's almost like the ball is bouncing off their self-centred aura. ( Just like Yuvraj Singh when he's in form )
I refuse to believe that I am the only spinner with this problem, and I also refuse to believe that the greatest bowlers of all time never had this problem. But how do you solve it?
Like you I am planning Winter sessions for Carmarthenshire U14 squad and possibly pre session trials depending on number of nominations from clubs. Focus will be developing some of the basic skillsets that we are working on now as well as becoming 'streetwise' tactically. This in addition to getting my head around new level 2 courses, one of which I am lead tutor in January. (via: https://www.facebook.com/pitchvisionacademy)
Coaching an U12's squad, we started last weekend.
We're really just working on the basics at the minute, bowlers getting their actions right and hitting a line and length, batsmen learning the basic shot shapes.
We also have a game of indoor cricket to finish each session, just to bring in an awareness of the different basic tactics, mainly when to bowl at the stumps vs when to bowl outside off stump and when to try and smack the ball vs when to tip and run.
Yes I am starting to think context is the key to a lot of player development.
Indoor cricket is a great way to improve your outdoor cricket batting (especially if you are playing a fast paced T20 game) but all the outdoor players in my region very rarely play indoor cricket. Our coaches regularly warn us that playing too much indoor cricket can lead to bad performances in outdoor cricket. As far as I'm concerned no amount of indoor cricket can worsen your outdoor cricket, and the pressure you feel during games is reduced by playing lots of indoor cricket because you can play more indoor cricket matches in less time than the outdoor format.
The lighter ball makes it easier for me to bowl the flipper, and bowling the flipper during an indoor cricket match isn't nearly as frightening as trying it in an outdoor cricket match! I don't know if it's just me but the flipper feels nearly impossible (Not meaning that I can't bowl it, I can, but the thought of trying it in a game seems ridiculous) So that's another thing I'm working on in indoor cricket.
You forget Jacques, that in the UK indoor cricket is very similar to outdoor cricket. Its not the softball pairs cricket they play down under, we play that at U11s but then move on to a more realistic format.
Our team is now working on developing aggressive shots for proper batsmen and improving defence of sloggers or tailenders u shd do an article how to improve ur aggressive shots and some key technical points of paddle sweep,ramp shot and dilscoop etc and which bowl to loft where like where to hit an outside off bowl for six and where like this on every line and lenght and how can attacking batsmen stay at the wicket and deliver the killer blow....