Cricket | Cricket coaching, fitness and tips

The perfect cricket fitness workout

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There are a million ways to get fit for cricket and improve your game so the perfect workout for you will be totally different from the next person. What do you need to consider when deciding how to get fit for cricket?

Back in the nets

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Has your preseason practice started yet? How are you doing?

My club started indoor nets this Sunday. It was a great feeling to get back to cricket after this long winter lay-off.

Just to show that I practice what I preach, here are the good things I did:

  1. Cover drives were spot on from the first ball.

How to make your captain love you

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Captains are stressed out people out in the field. There they are plotting several overs ahead while trying to winkle out the current partnership, set the field and change the bowling.

In the midst of all that chaos there is something every fielder can do to make the skippers job much easier, and improve you chances of winning:

What cricket tips would you like?

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As you know, I'm forever posting free tips on cricket coaching, fitness, mental skills, tactics, nutrition and captaincy. It's my passion.

I have plenty more ideas to come, but today I want to know what you want to hear about.

So let me know what you want and I'll whip up a post.

Recently, the emails I have got seem to be more focussed on the coaching side. I must admit I'm not the best technically (Although I am an ECB Level 2 coach) but if that's what you want I'll bone up on my technique further.

Tony Greig on the importance of club cricket

I was watching the highlights of the Australia Day ODI and in his analysis Tony Greig brought up the role club cricket has in making a strong national team.

Tony's argument can be summed up in an interview he did with the Guardian back in 2003:

"The problems with English cricket are not to do with the odd blunder by a captain or a lack of talent. The problem is that there is no meaningful amateur game. The sooner the ECB persuades the MCC to take total responsibility for the amateur game, and the sooner the MCC develops a format which allows a kid to work and still have an avenue to progress to international honours, the better.

Mike Brearley on building a great team

Great cricket teams can do extraordinary things. But greatness is not just a matter of individual talent. The captain has a key role in bringing the best out of every player and merging them into a successful team.

In "The Art of Captaincy" England's finest leader, Mike Brearley, outlines how captains (and senior players) can build 11 players into a formidable unit:

What cricketers have in common with fighter pilots

In Top Gun, Tom Cruise looked cool in his Ray-Bans. Many men tried to emulate his effortless machismo (and still do). In a way, you can emulate him too, but not to look good: To improve your cricket.

As we have talked about before, it takes around 10,000 hours of playing and practicing cricket to get really good at it.

How to gain the psychological edge

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Dave is a budding leg spin bowler putting in a lot of practice and keeping track of things on his blog. One of the critical factors for his team is getting the early advantage:

"I reckon we've got the psychological edge on them already, they'll all be thinking now - 'that's why that twat walks around with a cricket ball all the time' then realise I've been doing so for months and that we might be serious about this!? The plan is coming together - I can smell victory already, we've already won the psychological battle, all we need to do is turn the screws a bit more......"


The 2 secrets of great club cricket captaincy

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Have you ever captained your club team? If you have you know how it can seem like playing chess while running a marathon.

To keep yourself from going insane you need reliable bedrock principles to fall back on.

In club cricket these principles can be applied at any time to remind yourself why you are there in the first place: