18 Days to go.........

Not much news today. Saw the students that want to give us a game of cricket, they're up for it.... "We'll give you a good thrashing at that as well"........ Blah, blah, blah. I told him to check his email and get back to me. We'll see what happens.



I emailed David Hinchcliffe the bloke that runs the Harrowdrive website asking him about the tactics I saw being depolyed over at the Recreation Ground, Langdon Hills by the wicket keeper. He said yes some wicket keepers take a very aggressive approach in that being so close to the batsman and talking to your own players and looking to have the bails off at the slightest sign of the batsman coming out of his crease puts the batsman under a lot of pressure and helps break their concentration. It might be something Richard might want to try with their openers? He'll probably need some kind of body armour though and a helmet.

On that point I'm surprised no-one else has bought a helmet?

Tonight over at Great Berry I adopted some new approaches to see if I could vary my bowling some more. I bowled a lot of balls (70%) much faster than I would normally do to see if I could maintain the accuracy. Overall I did quite well keeping the wides below 15%. It looked as though it might be something I should try out on Thomas or Nakul and see how they deal with it. What I was tending to do though was bowl much longer lengths - yorkers. It seemed difficult to bowl shorter lengths, but when I did they did seem to turn slightly and looked to be more tricky to bat? I'll have to practice them more to see if I can bowl consistent lengths as and when required. The last 13 balls I threw I changed tactics completely and bowled short 'Wrong un's' and these turned very nicely and very consistently (75%). So over the next few days I'm going to mix up the wrong Uns and the fast flippers, aiming to bowl them short and see how the batsmen cope with them and see if they produce more wickets and catches.

Tonight overall...

Wides 12.9%
Good Uns - 24%
Strikes - 4.3%

Overall I was quite pleased with the way it went.

30 Days till the Sports Science Match. I spoke to Gavin today and he says they'll be wearing Light Blue, so we'll stick with Dark blue polo tops and tracksuits bottoms/shorts.