More bowling practice. This morning whilst watching the kids outside the house riding their bikes I threw a few ball on my concrete wicket and practiced fielding throws at the stumps as well.
The flipper is well and truly my stock ball although read on and I may be having a change of mind about this? So this morning I threw 61 balls varying the strategy. Some of the balls were thrown legside so that they then turn into the stumps. With this particular ball that I use on the tarmac I can do this really well making it turn a acute angles pitching 3' wide of leg about 4 or 5 yards from the stumps and it still flies across the front of the stumps to 'Off'. The disadvantage being that when it don't and it goes straight on or only deviates slightly that becomes a Wide? The rest of the balls were throw down the middle spinning wide of off.
Having done a whole load of these, by the end of the session I realised that of the two variations the second option seems to be better because when it goes awry it has a very good chance of hitting the stumps. If it does what it's supposed to do that batsman runs the risk of edging it to the wicket keeper or slips.
As I bowled the balls I recorded the outcome and this is something I've decided to do again with future practices. Of the 61 balls I threw 5 hit the stumps four of which were the legside versions. The sad thing is 33 balls were wides that's more than 50%!
I threw 21 straight balls of which 13 were wides. The rest were leg balls. Overall a very disappointing performance, but I was surrounded by four kids and was looking after my own kids so it was hardly a situation conducive with concentration.
Later on...........
Again the ridiculously hot weather continued 26 celcius in the shade 46 celcius in my back yard in the sun! I had to bowl and catch some sun, so off we went to Great Berry Open Space, there was no-one there it was empty and looked as though it had been all day, perhaps as well as starting earlier could we change to Sunday for our practices? Let me know what you all think?
So armed with my tally book and 24 balls a 210 ball session ensued over 2 hours on the wicket. The good news is I improved the pecentage of wides. 210 balls of which 64 were wide means a 30.4% of wides, which is still 2 per over. But I bowled variations and made some discoveries about how to reduce the wides.
Flipper - bowled leg - 66 balls 23 wides = 34%
Flipper - Bowled Straight - 90 balls 19 wides = 21%
As you can see the straight balls reduces the %, but this was further enhanced I think by shorter deliveries around the 4 - 5 yard mark, whereas the legside balls were all thrown longer between 2 yards and a yard in front of the stumps (Yorkers). This ball also hit the stumps 10 times when it failed to move away to off.
Hitting the stumps isn't the issue as yesterday proves 3 of my four wickets were all caught balls. What I'm after is the reduction of the wides and far better consistency with my bowling regarding where I want the ball to land. Length isn't a problem it's the width that's the problem. I need to be averaging 15% to be happy, so I'll be up first thing tomorrow before work and hopefully be able to throw at least 60 balls. I'll be trying short deliveries aimed at the stumps spinning off to the offside. Hopefully that'll produce a % figure of around 20% again?
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