Nice weather

Had some rain last night, so the ground everywhere is damp again and the grass is obviously growing rapidly. Yesterday I cut the wicket on the field and we all had a game on the field which was okay Ben and Joe did okay. Ben more so than Joe which is good because I kind of think that if either of them was going to throw the towel in it would be Ben, so when he bats and bowls well that's only a good situation. It seems that if things don't go his way he loses interest whereas Joe even though he's nearly 3 years younger he has a different attitude. It maybe that he senses that this is one area (Sport) that he's stronger in a lot of respects than his older brother and therefore is more than willing to put time in to practice and improve his game?

After an iffy morning it brightened up in the afternoon and ended up being the warmest day this year to date. 21 degrees centigrade and sunny. I cut the Oak Tree practice wicket and threw a couple of hundred balls on the field on the freshly mown wicket from yesterday. My leg break was on and off, fairly accurate turning a little bit but still more akin to a leg cutter most of the time than a leg break. There are spates of improvement and as I've said before I don't seem to be able to pinpoint what it is that is creating the improvement.

This evening I started to read Clarrie Grimmetts 'Taking wickets". An Aussie bloke Macca, has been copying the pages on a scanner and sending them to me by email and I've been reading it this evening. One of the things I noticed was that Grimmett recommends griping the ball high up in the fingers and later today on the Oak tree wicket just throwing balls at the Oak Trees trunk I'd been doing exactly this and seemingly getting some turn. At the moment I'm very frustrated that I can't go forward with my bowling Leg Break, I want some decent turn but I just can't get the ball to turn at will. I just need to keep plugging at it.

Nets hopefully might be useful this week and I want to have a bat as I've been using the Bradman Bat and I'm hoping that it's going to lead to some kind of improvement. We'll have to see?

Some Grimmett wisdom.....

I'm currently reading Grimmetts on taking wickets kindly copied and sent to me by Macca, cheers bloke very much appreciated! Anyway he's just mentioned a point regarding round arm verses a more vertical arm. The comparison he makes is that of skimming stones across a pond. Suggesting quite rightly that if you throw a flat stone using a vertical arm action it's simply going to disappear into the water, whereas the sideways arm action means that the flat stone doesn't break the surface and instead skims bouncing several times before disappearing. The inference is that the round arm action facilitates a faster movement off the pitch. The vertical action would mean some of the kinetic energy would be absorbed into the pitch and thus slow the ball down.