Thursday, February 14, 2008

Ben and Joe

My boys had a leaflet go around their school a couple of weeks ago highlighting a heap of activities that were going on at a local council leisure/sports centre. There was all the usual things that you'd expect - eye catching "Exciting stuff" - kick boxing, extreme this and extreme that and on Thursday 10am to 11am "Cricket". Not extreme cricket or death cricket, just your bog standard "Cricket" and without any prompting (Much to my wifes dismay) both my boys opted to do cricket!

So this morning I skipped work and took them down to the leisure centre with no idea as to what was going to happen armed with the knowledge that there was only going to be 4 kids in total unless more had signed up yesterday.Just after 10 a bloke turned up "Matt" from Essex County Cricket Club and away he went.

The bloke was brilliant! My 2 boys are quite shy and the other 2 kids initially gave the impression of being confident in their abilities of being potential cricketers, one citing that he'd been trialed by a team or similar. The bloke Matt went through warm ups - all cricket specific, gradually building towards arming them with balls and eventually bats. He taught them how to bowl and then a front foot drive and then they all played kwik cricket.My kids went from being vaguely interested in cricket to a new level, my little-un who's 6 turned out to be the best catcher and the my older son who's the least interested turned out to be the best seam bowler and batsman.The interesting thing was that the bloke kept the pace moving all the time, never at any point were they doing anything long enough for any of them to get bored or recognise that they weren't particularly good at it. Even at the end when they were playing competitively against each other instead of letting my oldest lad hog the limelight and accumulate an ever increasing total they renewed the game started afresh giving other kids the chance to shine and possibly be the winner.

The bloke was brilliant.Both my lads as you'll have read above only have a vague interest in cricket and I run the risk of being accused of over-kill and diminishing their chances of taking the sport up. They both came away saying they'd given it 9 out of 10 for fun!

**************

Weather's looking good for the weekend albeit cold. So Sunday I'm going to be there with the bloke from last Sunday and I'll be concentrating on my walk in and follow through. Still haven't looked at that damn video camera though.

No comments:

Post a Comment