Last season my team were cruising to an easy victory in a one day game. We had skittled the opposition for 144 and were 120 for 2 in reply.

I was down to bat at 6 but had not bothered to pad up, a situation which rapidly changed when we lost our best batsman to a rash shot followed almost immediately by the new batsman muttering something about unplayable deliveries as we passed each other.

Ex-England captain Nasser Hussain once said that Duncan Fletcher taught him cricket was all about angles.

Don't worry; you can put down your protractor. Both men are right but you don't need to be a maths whizz to be able to use angles to your advantage whether you are batting, bowling or captaining.

So what do I mean when I talk about different angles?

To move or to keep still, that is the question.

Almost every first class batsman has a trigger movement of some kind: That shuffle of the feet just before the bowler delivers the ball that gets you into position.  Yet the coaching books are adamant about keeping still.

As with all great cricketing questions the answer is 'it depends'.

Good swing bowling can literally be unplayable. If a ball swings late enough nobody, not Sachin, not Lara, not Bradman, has ever had good enough reactions to counter the movement. It's a physical impossibility.

Yet somehow great players manage to build epic innings when the ball swings. How do they do it?

While science has no answers yet, there are some interesting theories to explore.

Not many things on the cricket pitch top hitting the ball cleanly over the boundary. It looks and feels great. To improve this skill you need to have good technique and work on your 'speed-strength' during the winter. Speed-strength, in shot making terms, is how fast you can swing the bat. The faster you can do this with good technique the harder and longer you will be able to hit a cricket ball. This velocity is developed in three distinct phases:

Everyone loves Twenty20: The players, the fans and the county clubs bank managers. The only exception are the traditionalists who see it as a corruption of the great game. There is much to learn from the short game though, even for club cricketers who turn out once a week. Here are 10 of them: