March 12th
Joe’s had a good week this last week, he had some nice
messages on Facebook about his return to the net sessions where he had a bowl,
he’s been doing gymnastics at school on the horses and generally getting back
to normal. This last weekend 9th & 10th I bought some
batting pads for him and a pair of Slazenger spikes for the new season, he
normally gets Ben’s hand me down ones, but Ben hasn’t worn spikes for a while
turning down the offer last season from us to buy them, so Joe’s got a brand
new pair for once!
So this weekend they had a session whereby they used the
whole hall and set up like indoor cricket set up where everyone fielded and they
used the bowling machine instead of
rotating the bowlers. Everyone batted having 15 balls where they lost 5 runs if
their wicket was lost, then after 15 balls they had an extra 15 balls, where if
they were out, that was it… dismissed. Ben batted okay apart from losing his
wicket in the first 15 3 times and then lasted an extra few balls past the
mandatory 15. Joe was offered the chance and with the prospect of batting with
his new pads he accepted and did really well lasting up to 23 balls and only got
dismissed once as I recall. I think he was quite pleased with his efforts and
he got a lot of encouragement from the rest of the players.
Kieran did well, as he always does with the training balls,
smacking the ball miles through mid-wicket region, whether in real life it
would clear the boundary or not is another matter and being in the air always
runs the risk of being caught, but looked impressive nonetheless. I had a go as
well and tried flicking the ball off the legs and doing the paddle sweep shot,
didn’t do too bad. I copped one in the face at the outset, but it helped that
the ball was only being bowled at 50 mph and straight and a Bola ball, as a
opposed to a real cricket ball much faster or breaking from an off-spinner!
The limp
The limp is probably getting better, but it seems as though
Joe has good days and bad days with regards to the limp, a couple of weeks back
it was hardly noticeable, whereas in the last week it seems to be more obvious,
but we are looking at him having it for the summer with the hope that it fades
over the summer.
Scars
As mentioned before, the progress of these is difficult to
ascertain as it is a slow process (Scar healing) and not that obvious. In
different types of light the scars are more obvious, so some days they look
good, other days they look bad, but generally I still think they’re improving
very slowly. I’m now only photographing them once a month, so that if there are
any subtle changes, they might be visible in the images? But, because of the
slow progress, I think Joe is less inclined to massage the scars because he
doesn’t see any benefit in doing so, so we have to keep on at him constantly in
order that he does do it.
School cricket
Yesterday 11th March, Joe had his first ever
cricket session at school with Mr Ackred, I think there’s another bloke Mr
white whose in charge of cricket this year whose even more enthusiastic about
cricket than Ackred, who primarily is a rugby player, but who puts a lot of
effort into the cricket team as far as I can make out. I can’t remember if I
mentioned it before, but Joe won £200 for the school because of his Jack
Petchey award win and he designated the money to be spent on cricket equipment.
The session was indoors and from what Joe tells me they broke up into 3 groups
based on ability, and prior experience… Boys that have some experience and were
interested, boys that were interested and wanted to get involved and the final
group… Football players. Joe was in the first group and his team won. He said
that at this stage it was very basic – a version of Kwik Cricket where three
sets of stumps where aligned side by side and the ball was bowled under-arm.
As yet there’s no cricket training in the evening or dinner
time, Ben reckons that his team (3rd years) will struggle to get a
team out, he seemed to think that by the time boys at his school reached the 3rd
year they were more inclined to be wanting to go home and update their facebook
accounts and preen their hair than go and play cricket, so he’s not holding out
much hope. So we’ll have to watch that situation, but from conversations with
his team manager at the club it does sound as though he’s going to be playing a
lot of cricket outside of school this year, so it wont matter that much.
