Ask any club captain and one of the first things he will bemoan about his team is the lack of ability to rotate the strike.

Sure, decent batsmen put the bad ball away. It’s not so easy when the pitch is tricky, the bowling is tight and the field is set to squeeze. The run rate drops and you find it difficult to set a total.

It doesn’t matter what sort of cricket you play: Clubs the world over face the same problems and are looking for solutions.

Take Watsonian; the PitchVision Academy adopted club. The side are the top of the league cricket tree. They have aspiring professionals and play at well maintained grounds. Yet when I visited the club I discovered that they have as many problems to handle as anyone else.

The captain is the all powerful dictator of a cricket team. At first glance it’s his tactical nous that makes a group of individuals into a team and wins matches.

Despite this appearance, good teams operate with a collective consciousness that is greater than even the captain. It’s almost like the Borg. Just like the science-fiction hive mind race, when you are all working together, resistance is futile.

When you play a team you’ve beaten before you relax. You have figured them out.

You don’t need special strategies you can play the cookie-cutter way: win the toss and bat first. It’s in the bag.

Setting a total in a one day match relies on the ability of a team to judge what a good score is on that day. It depends on conditions and relative team abilities, all of which need to be assessed from match to match.

Yet in club cricket, a total of 200 always comes up as the ‘magic’ score that will lead to inevitable victory.

The revolutionary PitchVision Academy Problem Solver has had a major upgrade.

Judging by the number of questions we get here at PitchVision Academy, a lot of players and coaches have a cricketing problem they need solving. Everyone has something; a technical flaw in the cover drive, not quick enough bowling, getting gassed with low fitness levels and a hundred other things.

We also know that there is a frustrating gap for most of us.

Captaincy at club level is the one place in cricket you can find better players than you see in the professional game.

And it’s also the place you can see some horrific butchering of the art of captaincy. If it’s bad enough it could cost your club dearly, as this story shows.

During a short stint at a club two years ago, I played with a captain who used to smoke while standing at mid-on.

Knowing when to leave a fielder up or push him back is quite the art.

Do it too early and you give away easy runs or miss a chance to take a wicket. Do it too late and it costs you big.

Tactically aware bowlers seem to have this 6^th sense, Jedi mind trick to know when to do it. But it’s more a conundrum to others.

Working in the grey area

During a match in the 2005 Ashes, the 5^th wicket had just fallen and Adam Gilchrist strolled to the crease. The game was in the balance at 208-5. Orthodoxy dictated a couple of slips and a fine leg the only boundary runner.

But Vaughan directed a fielder to deep point.

Critics were up in arms. They accused the skipper of setting a field for bad bowling; a mistake a schoolboy captain would think twice about.

Having a successful club season doesn’t just happen by luck.