All good death batters have options to counteract death bowling.

I have worked with some excellent batsmen who thrive at the death. They work tirelessly at developing skills around the three balls they are most likely to get:

Yorker.

Slower ball.

Bouncer.

So how do they do it, and how can you coach it at your level?

How to hit the yorker

Owais Shah (T20 expert and ex-England player) used to ask me to try and hit the yorker length from a bowling machine and he would come up with a few options to hit or guide for runs.

Sometimes he would jump back in the crease just ahead of ball release to get under the really full ball, bend his knees and try to hit a flat trajectory shot straight over the bowlers head.

Or he would target those Line Drive and Drop Kick areas that we recently covered.

His intention was to drive the ball low and hard to get 2 or 4. Occasionally, he would time it so well that Owais would clear the ropes. He did this brilliantly against Tim Southee in a 2008 ODI at Durham in his 25 ball 49.

On other occasions, Owais would guide the ball past the keeper for 4 or try and beat 3rd Man either side for a boundary. His stillness of head and body at ball strike was crucial. This allowed him to watch the ball closely and then use his hands (his kinaesthetic awareness) to manoeuvre the ball to its intended tactic.

Duncan Fletcher - former England and current Indian coach - was an advocate of a shorter back swing when you knew that a bowler has a propensity for yorkers at the end of innings. His view was that if you set yourself for a yorker then once you see that the ball was going into another length, your body would adjust - or step and swing action/reaction in biomechanical terms - and the swing would lengthen as the body steps into the different length ball.

Paul Collingwood was amazing at this, even against yorker bowlers as awesome as Malinga and Brett Lee. He set himself for yorker and then adjusted when he picked up variations in length with a more expansive step and swing technique.

Have a go at a combination of these two approaches and see how you get on.

How to hit the slower ball

One of the best exponents of the slower ball back in my day was the Australian, Ian Harvey. He became an expert in delivering different versions of slower deliveries. At Hampshire, we use to assume that every ball in his second spell was going to be a slower ball and then trust ourselves to adjust when he pushed the ball through at his normal medium pace. We couldn't run down the pitch at him because the incredible Jack Russell was waiting for us to lift a foot. Playing conventional shots with a adapting mindset (slower ball to pace on) was the way to go.

We didn't get it right in all our games yet his impact at the back end of the innings lessened game on game which informed us that the new approach was paying off.

The value of wisdom

The Fletcher and Harvey examples both incorporate information to inform strategy and approach.

I'm sure that you have bowlers in opposition teams that predominantly bowl slower balls or go to yorker a lot at the end of an innings. Can you use this knowledge to inform your team training and strategies against them next time round?

"Knowledge that is not utilised retains its status of only being Knowledge; Knowledge when applied becomes Wisdom."

Which one do you have when it comes to the yorker and slower ball bowlers at the end of an innings?