Went in to work today so limited opportunities to practice. I'm on the train writing at the minute and it's lovely and sunny and warm with no obvious wind so a good evening to possibly knock up a video for the website and an evening to do some stock pictures of the kids. I want to get shots of them wearing traditional school boy clothes playing cricket, whether it'll happen or not I'm not sure but I do want to do that kind of shot soon and if I'm going to let the practice wicket on the field over-grow which seems increasingly likely I need to do these images in the next couple of days. Added to that despite the fact the weather is nice at the minute the prediction on the weather report this morning is that the next few days especially tomorrow are going to be marred by rain. Looking out of the train the clouds indicate that's the case as there's Mackerel Sky cloud cover and that's usually a pretty safe indication of a front moving in and a change in the weather for the worse. Actually looking west in the direction we're travelling and the direction the weather would be moving in from, it looks a lot cloudier and the clouds looken laiden with rain.
I'm hoping that overnight it does rain so that the new wicket starts to come together in some positive manner. If I get to practice tonight I'll be mostly focussing on wrong uns and getting them down the prospective sides. I can get them to turn and I reckon I get a decent length what I need to be able to do is get them on a controlable line e.g on the off-stump and anywhere up to a foot wide of it so that there's always the threat of the ball going the other way and legside anywhere wide of the leg stump but then turns in well viciously threatening to hit the stumps, nothing straight down that side. In the short term I'll stick with using the 9 red balls for Leg Breaks and 3 white balls for wrong uns. I need to explore further the potential for the Top-spinner flick version to continue turning big and the loose in the hand version to turn a little bit and be a lot more accurate in the short term.
Much later on....... 21.42 Hrs
We've got rain and thunder and at last the rain that's required to get the new wicket growing and binding together nicely. Just before dusk though I decided that I wouldn't let the wicket go to fallow and went over there 15 minutes ago under threatening clouds and gave it a mowing. This was partly down to the fact that Ben and Joe had taken one of their mates over there this afternoon and played cricket for a little while and Ben was trying to teach him how to bowl.
As I came back past the compound with the new wicket I went in there and attempted to give that a cut as well but the blades are set so low on the mower that it was a lost cause and I gave up. I didn't get to do half the things I wanted to do, I didn't shoot the pics of Ben and Joe but I did have 2 stints in the compound bowling and that went very well on both ocassions.
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