This is a guest article by Australian club cricketer, Andrew Pelechaty

Like most weekend warriors, my love for cricket outstripped my talent.

For 17 years, I plugged away as a C-grade outdoor cricketer; I played summer and winter. I trained regularly. I obsessed over the game.

It didn’t really help.

While I was an adequate left-arm off-spinner (a hat-trick, three five wickets hauls and over 100 wickets for the Coorparoo Sub-District club), I lacked patience to bowl long spells and wasn’t a big turner of the ball. Flight was my weapon.

My batting was hopeless; a specialist number eleven who took over 100 games to score 100 runs for Coorparoo. I was the record holder for most ducks and had a high score of 7 not out. While I had a decent defence, I was too scared to take risks and happy to settle inside my defensive comfort zone.

My fielding wasn’t much better. I couldn’t catch. My ground fielding - after lots of work - was passable. I enjoyed fielding at square leg but I was regularly posted fine leg to fine leg, where I could keep out of trouble.

To be honest, most players would have given up the game ages ago, but - despite my lack of success - the desire was still there to improve, despite a constant feeling that I wasn’t good enough.

The indoor revelation

In 2014, I started playing indoor cricket. I’d seen it on TV and always wanted to play, though assume I was unsuited to it.

Turns out, indoor cricket made me a better cricketer.

The security of the format helped. I was guaranteed to bowl a maximum of two overs every game. No longer would I have anxiety that one bad over in outdoor would cost me. Now I had twelve balls to do my best and could use my strength - good flight and an ability to hit a decent line - to tie down attacking batsman.

If I could bowl my two overs and keep it tight, my job was done. Wickets were a bonus.

The biggest benefit was my batting.

No longer could I hide behind defensive batting, I needed to learn to score runs. With some trial-and-error (I was a terrible slogger), I learnt how to make runs. I focus on getting bat on ball, keep the ball on the ground and getting down the other end. Minimise risk. While I’ll never be a natural batsman, I went from being too scared to hit out (and scared of fast bowlers) to being confident enough to rotate the strike. I averaged between 5–10 runs. A vast improvement on my outdoor cricket.

As for the fielding, let’s call it a draw. I still can’t catch, but fielding close to the batsman keeps me in the game and I can be useful by knocking the ball down and backing up any wayward throws. My throwing’s improved too.

More importantly, my enthusiasm for playing hasn’t been this high since I was a teenager. I’m constantly thinking about the game and how I can improve.

That’s the beautiful thing about cricket: it doesn’t matter how talented you are, if you have desire, you’ll find a form that suits you.

Andrew Pelechaty played 17 years for the Coorparoo Sub-District Cricket Club and currently plays indoor cricket in Brisbane. Andrew loves cricket because of the different formats and how the game embraces players of all abilities and styles.