1st Week of September

No game this week with Grays as the game was called off due to a lack of players. I was hoping that I might get a game with B&PCC but that didn't happen either. As it turns out it was probably a good job too as I was up at 5.30 am and at a boot sale from between 6.30 and 12.00 and if I'd have gotten the call to play I would have done.

Instead I practiced over in the paddock as it was lovely and warm - a cloudy bright kind of day. Ben and Joe joined me at different stages of the day and both had a bit of a bat and a bowl. Both of them bowled okay, but neither of them bat very well and they don't take any notice of me when I try and tell them what to do. While we were over there I tested out the net situation to see if it was going to be feasible and it was to some extent. The thing that I over-looked and wouldn't have ever considered was the affects of using a net with a really fine mesh. You can see from the picture below the down-side of using the fine nets - the wind catches it and fails to pass through it meaning that it billows out like a sheet on a washing line.

What we'll have to do is peg/pin the bottom of the net at regular stages and also have a couple of longer poles to take up the slack in the net in the middle. The nets not that heavy, but getting the rope taught between the goal posts is difficult and even once you've got it taught it's obvious that it would benefit from having the net supported at least twice along it's length.

You can see that the surface in front of the stumps is now pretty bereft of grass and slowly bit by bit the introduction of additional earth means that it's far more level than it was when we first started to use The Paddock. You can see in the image above just to the left edge of the frame in the centre of the image how the grass was. It was made up of clumps with big gaps in between the clumps. With it now well into september and wanting to establish a fair bit of growth before November when the temperature dips frequently below 4 degree centigrade and halts the growth of the grass, I really need to be getting the grass seed down so that it can establish itself. But we're currently experiencing a very long and dry summer and there's no sign of any rain. In fact tomorrow it's going to be one of the hottest days of the year with temps of 27 degrees centigrade. Despite that I've started to lay the new earth down ready for the seeding so on Sunday I put down the first layer when we finished playing and rolled it.

I've drawn all over this one that shows the first instalment of fresh earth in an attempt to completely level the wicket. C is where the stumps are situated normally. B is the middle stump mark for when you take your guard at the batsman and A is a marker where I put a target sometimes when I'm practicing. So on Sunday evening when this was shot I'd put down an area about 5' x 12'. Tonight I did some more after me and Joe had a knock about and I've extended the bit that's in this shot another 6 or 8 foot further towards the other end. I've got 2 bags of soil in the garage and the work so far hasn't used all of one bag, so it looks as though we're going to be able to level off an area 8'x20' so about 1/3rd of the entire wicket which is good. I need to do something with the bowlers end as well as it's really uneven and that may have been instrumental in my fall when bowling where I dislocated my finger. So all in all it's going fairly well, one additional thing I may do is buy some new seed with a mixture of different grasses as I think the grass I've got is Rye Grass and I need some fescues.

Also I've got another new blog this one is all about the different Flipper Variations from the 1930's (Clarrie Grimmett) http://spinbowling-flipper.blogspot.com/ in the blog there's several video clips that have been uploaded to Youtube.