This article is part of the miCricketCoach 2009 Case Study. To stay up to date with their progress get the free newsletter.

This update will focus on a technical analysis of Naz batting in the nets. Naz has sent in a video of him batting at Lords' indoor school. Here is what I have discovered.

As you can see from the first shot, his setup looks solid, but there are a couple of problems with it that I have highlighted. First, his eyes are not quite level. More importantly, his front elbow and shoulder is pointing towards mid off meaning he is picking his bat up over leg stump. I suspect it is because he trusts his off side shots more than the leg side and is looking to hit through the off side even in his setup.

This can lead to poor footwork as it is hard to get forward or properly back and across from this initial position.

The good news is that most of the time he readjusts both his head position and backlift as he steps forward to the ball on the off stump as you can see in the next picture:

When playing shots Naz has a smaller hitting zone than he could have because of the way he lines up his bat. With pitched up balls on or just outside the off stump he lines up well as we have seen. When the ball is back of a length his backswing moves out to gulley and comes down and an angle meaning his timing has to be spot on to middle it:

I'm guessing he slices a lot of those shots and gets caught at gulley or cover point, especially as he has not moved his back foot across (a result of his closed setup).

For leg side balls he does the same thing. Here he can get away with it more as you need to be more open to hit through the leg side, especially the flick off the legs to a half volley. However it's still a little too wide for me here, he could tighten that up a bit to give the option of an on drive

The final thing to mention is Naz's shape as he drives. Take a look at these pictures of him driving:

Here the face and toe of the bat end up pointing in a different direction to where the ball was supposed to be hit. This is because he is closing the face of the bat and risking missing the drive or getting a leading edge.

The reason for this is that he is not getting forward enough and losing the shape of his arms in his downswing. Instead of letting his top hand and and high elbow control the shot he is trying to generate power by snapping his wrists through the ball. The toe of the bat ends up pointing down the white line instead of the yellow line in the picture below:

He would hit it a lot better by leaning into the shot more and swinging the bat in a smooth motion like a golf swing rather than an ice hockey slap.

Drills to improve technical errors

The key for me is to build up from a straight drive, front and back foot. This will teach Naz to line himself and his bat from his initial stance to moving to the ball. I'm going to ask Naz to do some drills with a tennis ball initially, moving on to throwdowns or a bowling machine when he is feeling more comfortable.

The idea is to 'shape' Naz to make some minor changes. There is nothing major about his technique that is flawed; he just could do better by lining up right and keeping his shape through the shot.

If you want to learn everything there is to know about technique, check out Gary Palmer's interactive coaching courses. Gary is a coach with over 20 years experience teaching players to become first class cricketers. For the first time he has put his drills online, only at PitchVision Academy.