Let's all stop being afraid of bowling actions.

Coaches are increasingly afraid of coaching because of a culture of fear in cricket. Bowlers live in terror of ruining their natural action.

I argue we are all wasting a chance to improve both pace and accuracy. We just need to shake off the fear. You can see it in the media. In this article about James Harris we are told,

"the Swansea-born seamer decided to put the tinkering to one side and revert to what made him successful in the first place."

Anyone reading that idea would be sensible in assuming bowlers should never adjust their action. If you bowl in the natural way, you will do well. If you change things you will fail. Just like Harris and other names like Steve Finn, James Anderson and Liam Plunkett.

It's no wonder club coaches never do anything with an action for fear of breaking someone.

The tyranny of "tinkering"

Yet, improvements can be made. Improvements are made quietly every day at club, school and first-class levels. It's just there is a better story in a failed bowler who has been tinkered with.

The word "tinkering" is a code word. It really means "changing a bowling action for the worse, despite the best of intentions". Add the word "biomechanist" in there and you have real world players and coaches spitting out their tea in disgust.

On the other hand, when a bowler changes her action for the better you never hear about tinkering. You hear about adjustments and technical improvements.

That's because you absolutely can change an action and create a better bowler.

The art of bowling

You see, a bowling action is not a black-or-white thing. Unlike the way stories in the papers tell it, there is not an evil scientist holding a clipboard trying to make identical bowling robots. There is not an honest toiling bowler who just wants to bowl and forget all the mumbo-jumbo.

There is a swathe of grey. It's the job of a bowler to use the method that works best. It's the job of the coach to push that player to try different things in the quest for more speed, accuracy or both. That's the art of learning to bowl.

It's a key point to note that the bowler is the person who is in charge of this process.

She will get a lot of input from people during a career. From a helpful parent through to a highly qualified scientist in a performance programme, inputs will come thick and fast. Yet only one person can really know what is working: The bowler.

You can handle change

So, the skill of a modern bowler is to take all this advice, try out some things that seem sensible and be prepared to drop things that don't work.

Things will go wrong sometimes. There will be periods where you go backwards. That's not a bad thing. That's learning, because learning is not a linear line upwards. The mistake is being afraid to try something even once in case it breaks you forever.

Bowlers don't forget how to bowl because they try something new.

You can always go back if you need to, as the above examples have proven.

And if you don't need to, well done, you have just improved.

As this article notes,

"As Plunkett put it: 'I think you learn when you're older to filter stuff. If it's good advice you can keep it and take it with you but if it's not you can say no thanks.' And here's Finn: 'It’s up to the player to filter [advice]. And that's part of the skill of being a good player, knowing what is relevant and what is irrelevant.'"