How can you improve on perfection?

The ICC Women’s World Cup Final was a perfect and fitting end to an exceptional tournament.

England and India were the best two sides in the tournament and it was an absolute honour and privilege to be at Lords on Sunday to witness such a fitting end to a fantastic month of cricket

However, one area of the game that can shift significantly is batting against spin. Back foot play against spin in particular.

Harmanpreet Kaur displayed an ideal front foot game in her Player of the Day Semi Final performance against Australia.

Harmanpreet swept, slog swept and used her feet to hit over the top fantastically.

As soon as the ball was up, it was off!

But when the ball is bowled into the pitch or a bowler drops slightly short, the Women’s game has to learn to adapt if it is to continue to drive batting standards forward.

The universal way to play a shorter ball from a spinner in Women’s Cricket based on this World Cup is to step back towards leg stump and cut or back foot drive the ball.

On Sunday, there were 42 separate examples of this in the exceptional final.

From these 42 deliveries, the batters accrued 12 runs. 12 Runs!!!

Heather Knight and Deepti Sharma made some good stops from extra cover yet the back foot drive/cut shot against spin only yielded 12 Runs from 9 scoring deliveries across 42 attempts in Sunday’s final.

The Stats:

• Scoring Ball%: 21.4%
• Runs per Scoring Shot: 1.33
• Strike Rate: 28.6

These statistics are almost identical in the younger age group cricket (U14 to U15) cricket that I have worked in over the past 2 years at school.

The Millfield U15 side this year created similar stats at the start of the year: Too many instances where there were back foot drives and cuts to fielders with insufficient pace on the ball or in the pitch.

So, What’s the answer?

Develop adaptable footwork.

In simplistic terms, the best batters are those with the most amount of effective options to any given ball. If you train only one footwork pattern then you will have limited options available to that short of a length and short ball.

Encourage your players to develop both the step back into Leg stump and step back into Off stump to create different angles and scoring options.

On the evidence of this World Cup, the batters have one option and one option only.

Constraint practice is great for this.

Throw 12 spin balls at a batter with the intention to only be able to hit legside and then another 12 balls with an off side scoring intention.

Most players work this out and start adopting different movement patterns without any direct instruction.

Then, follow up with a discussion to galvanise the learning from the drill and repeat the drill over and over again until both options are mastered.

Pull Hard! Pull First!

To step away from the Women’s game for a second, the best puller of a spinning ball I saw in the Men’s International game was Mike Hussey.

“Mr Cricket” would take a huge step back into Off stump, flex his legs to get his eyes as close to the height of the ball as possible and flat bat the ball to the left hand side of the mid wicket fielder (Mike was a left handed batter).

Brilliant.

I would show all the Women’s World Cup squads this incredibly simple option. With lots of practice, any batter can become as good as Mike and begin to play this hard hit shot option to balls that only miss length by a fraction.

I can envisage the next ICC World Cup being harder for spinners already!

Combining these two footwork patterns and a “Mr Cricket” pull shot would make life very difficult for the spin bowlers and their captains to keep the batters under the cosh.

You can’t defend both square boundaries on both sides of the wicket and with so much spin bowled in Women’s cricket within power play overs, the captain does not always have a full quota of boundary riders at their disposal anyway.

These simple processes, basic drills and lots of practice would have significant impact upon those World Cup Final Stats.

Review:

The Millfield spin stats (back of a length to short) in the last 5 matches of our season read like this:

• 35 balls
• 41 Runs
• Scoring Ball%: 60%
• Runs per Scoring Shot: 1.86
• Strike Rate: 117.1

This transformation came from practicing our footwork patterning in every session (twice a week) for 6 weeks.

That’s got to be a good investment of time, hasn’t it?

So, Womens International Cricket can improve on perfection.

Roll on New Zealand in 2021 and good luck to the spinners!