Plans for the Off-season

So what now? The season has ended and in comparison to last years bowling an exponential improvement. At some point last year whether it was at the end of the season or at the start I set myself the target of beating my mate The Wizard (Alex McLellan) with regards the statistics and depending on how well he bowled today I've probably achieved this. Although he has bowled a 100 more overs than me and I have to acknowledge that if I'd bowled as many the story may have been different?

So what do I work on? Last year it was easy I had the Googly Syndrome so I spent all winter correcting that. This year I can bowl a bag full of variations and have already dropped some of the variations as they seem impractical or there's a simpler version that does the same thing.

At the moment in practice I use the following.........

Leg Break #1 - High in fingers type
Leg Break #2 - Deep in hand type
Leg Break #3 - The unfurled flick type

Flipper - Top-spinner
Wrong Un
Top-Spinner
Flipper - Back-spinner
Leg Break #3 - The big flick

I bowl the leg break in a load of different ways and can potentially bowl the Biggun with the big flick, but it needs a lot of work and I'm not that sure that if I was to work on it over the winter the benefits would be that massive. The Leg Break No.2 produces a big turning ball and may in the longer term if worked on be a better more accurate way of bowling?

I noted today that the bloke I bowled against was playing cautiously against my Leg Breaks but he was completely undone by the Wrong Un saying 'I nearly broke my wrists trying to get the bat on that ball'. I'm wondering whether if I was to work on the wrong uns accuracy more it might be useful bowled alongside the Leg Breaks? There's loads of conflicting advice out there which also leads to confusion. Recently I've had a bloke say that I should bowl shorter, but today Bootsie and Bruno were bowling fairly full and pinning their batsmen down pretty well and getting maidens or very low scoring overs. Bootsie was telling us all to bowl full - right up on the toes, but that may have been because he felt that the bats lacked the confidence to come down the wicket and were lacking confidence playing spin.

Whatever the truth is I'm still not sure what I should be looking at doing over the winter at this point.

Obvious things additional to the cricket stuff are general fitness and working on core strength, shoulder and arm strength.