Neither Ben or I were selected this week, which is a bit gutting as the weather is set to be fine and it's at our local pitch just a few hundred yards away. So instead we're heading down to the south coast for a bit of beach cricket maybe and possibly some surfing as the wind is going to be offshore... Just checked, no surf it's flat. Cricket it is then and a little light reading - Charlotte Cottons "Photography as Contemporary Art".
Other than that tonight, I mowed the wicket in the paddock and had a bowl. My bowling in the last couple of matches has been poor for a number of reasons and when I came away from the last game I'd decided that maybe I should look at my walk in/run in. I'm less inclined to work on the faster run-in and maybe look at working with a very short walk in, as it seems my accuracy is massively improved and I get the ball to spin far better. Someone had noted that as I run in I waver all over the place and they said that perhaps this was the reason for my inaccuracies. Recently one of the main things I've been doing with a more energetic run in is bowl full tosses and this is a recipe for disaster. So I tried the energetic approach and again poor accuracy and very bad length.
One of the things I then considered if I am going to bowl off of a short walk in, was to increase the arm-speed e.g. whip the arm over at more speed to allow a variation in the speed of the ball through the air, so I've been working on press-up, planks and other core strength and rotator cuff exercises and generally there seems to be some improvement. Although watching one of the Finger spinners at the club and facing Finger spinners, it's not so much the speed, but more the accuracy and the length. So off the 2 step walk -in, if I can increase accuracy and consistency of length and line, the other components are already there. The handful of balls I bowled tonight did seem to come out really well and spun really well with loads of turn off the wicket. The same approach works well with the Googly and my current flipper variation, but no doubt a match will be the measure of how effective it is...
