I received a cry for help on Facebook the other night from a dear friend of mine who plays village cricket in the heart of Somerset.

Rotating the strike is the most unglamorous and under-appreciated skill in batting. You know you need to improve it but you never work on it. How do you solve the problem?

This is a guest article from Fish Hoek Cricket Club Head Coach, Jamie Rood

I run spin sessions by throwing off spinners to a 5/4 leg side biased field. We have a slip catching and two fielders out at square leg and deep midwicket. Everyone else is in the ring.

In one particular session, I was working with Kegan, an U16 batsman who enjoys working the ball into the leg side and picking it up over mid-wicket. Here's what we did.

With the ability to hit fours and sixes becoming important part of our game, helping batsmen find ways generate power takes a higher priority during every coaching session.

What is the purpose of the follow-through?

I ask it a lot, particularly from a batting perspective. Some of the answers are brilliantly inaccurate but tell me that we, as coaches, have done a poor job of explaining the follow through despite the frequency of use in coaching dialogue.

So let’s put this into a front foot drive context. What explanations do I hear on a day to day basis?

The use of weighted balls in power hitting and pitching in baseball is not a new thing, but it’s so brilliant that even us traditional cricket coaches are now cottoning on to the merits.

We had a great question come in on the Cricket Show from Basit, who talked about his lack of confidence to get behind the ball when it's aimed short pitched and at the body. He felt that he was taking too many balls on the body. This often comes from a lack of confidence through a player believing that they have not got the skills to attack or cope with the incoming delivery.

It is then the coaches' responsibility to build both confidence and competence through a series of drills.

One early season challenge is the adaptation from indoor surfaces to slow and two paced grass pitches.

You go hard at the perfect away swinging delivery and edge it to second slip.

You get forward to the spinner and push his length ball into the off side, calling quickly you take off for a single, making it easily.

Both of these moments are examples of playing with “hard hands”: Playing a defensive shot but pushing into the ball.

Duncan Fletcher had lots of “Fletchisms”. One of my favourite Fletcherisms is “train the brain!”.