Bit of a practice

As the Easter Break has gone on and the weather has continued to be warm and sunny, I've been able to get outside a lot and have a muck about with the kids, cricket, football, run-outs in the woods, cycling and generally lots of walking around and this is all making my leg stronger. Last night, I power walked to the corner shop rather than take the car and that was okay too and it' something I may do again as it's low impact and it does build strength in the thighs. The most rigorous test was the run outs in the woods - uneven ground, kneeling and bending down and I came back from that with sore knees. The discomfort seems to be across the top of the knee now at the base of the thigh muscle and that day I applied ice to it for 15 minutes and that sorted it. At the minute I'm using massage and stretching and bit by bit that seems to be working. Yesterday or Saturday I bowled 12 overs worth of balls using the bound in my bowling action and I came away from that okay, so slowly it does seem that I recovering. Today I mowed the paddock and lowered the blades a bit and the cut now is pretty short. With the weather the paddock is already cracking up and as it's been very dry I'm not sure if it's as flat as it was last year and it seems as though there's a lot less bounce. The session today bowling off of 3 or 4 steps went quite well, very good line, some good turn when I bowl with my karate chop wrist position, but I had a tendency to bowl quite full. My wrong Uns good and the Flippers are coming out well in all four variations. I've been working with the Wrong wrong Un which is one that Grimmett himself gave up on deciding it didn't look as though it had any prospects. I bowled it a couple of years ago without the knowledge of Grimmetts experiments back in the 1930's. I came across it bowling the Googly and the Flipper combined and named it The Gipper not aware of its origins. My experiments with it came to nothing across a season, because I could only bowl it with a very exaggerated action, but a couple of months ago I bowled a Wrong Un primarily with the addition of the Flipper click rather than vice versa with a different emphasis. This new approach produced what felt like a Wrong Un but spun like a Leg Break and considerably faster than my conventional Leg Break. So today I threw a few and they look promising as a variation, but I couldn't get the length right, the line was good though, so a little more practice and the Wrong wrong un may be a viable variation?

Weekend cricket

Nets on Sunday Joe and Ben Joe and Ben’s nets session was a slow starter today with both of them as with last week bowling poorly initially, but as the session progressed their bowling got better. Ben initially was bowling short and down the leg side, Joe on the other hand was bowling full tosses down both sides mostly the leg-side. The coach Chris set Joe some targets e.g. bowl a full length ball at the stumps and Joe took it on board and tried to bowl 5 out of 5 in the way Chris had suggested and straight away his bowling changed. By the end of the session Joe had disturbed the wood work 3 times and forced errors that would have created catching chances at point, cover and mid wicket all of which looked like dollies. This approach by the coach Chris was very interesting and I wonder if it's under-pinned by any sort of learning theory and whether it's an approach that is taught to coaches? The basis of the approach maybe that you break down the goal that was set into bite size and measurable pieces. For a kid Joes age the session of an hour almost probably blurs into a series of un-quantifiable levels of success and if he's bowling poorly as he was the general feeling would be that the whole session was a bit of a flop? But, breaking down his success potential into small renewable chunks that he himself can quantify might help to measure success rates and therefore spur him on as it did. Maybe even if you bowl 1 good one out of 5, it's measurable and then you can discard it and move on to the next five and therefore be bouyed by the fact that you attained 1 out of 5? Whereas if you're looking at the bowling over a period of an hour, the good balls are lost in amongst and much larger volume of poor balls? Ben on the other hand hadn’t hit the stumps but created catching chances for the wicket keeper, slips and gully off of balls down the off-side, showing a big improvement as the session went on. The other boys Finlay, Harrison and Harry were all bowling really well too, Harry was particularly good with in-swingers that didn’t swing till the last few yards. Enthused by Joe’s potential 6 wicket haul he was up for bowling some more once we got home. Having mowed the paddock this afternoon a while before going to nets both Joe and Ben were up for using the paddock rather than driving over to the tennis courts at the Rec. It’s a little damp over there at the minute so early in the year and could do with some more rolling, but we gave it a go and it was okay. We took the camera and shot some vid which I’m working on now as I write, which I’ll upload to Youtube later tonight. Knee issues I’d already had a bowl in the paddock earlier once I’d mowed it and bowled probably 15 overs albeit only off of a 2 or 3 step walk in and up to that point my knee was holding out well. In addition to bowling I’ve actually jogged about a bit today too and that was trouble free, so I’ve been looking pretty good on the knee front of late and it looks like recovery is happening. The bowling then that took place in the paddock which would have also combined squatting down to get under a fence and some running around and jumping had a little more affect on me and I came away from that feeling a little tenderness, so I’ll put some ice on that before I go to bed tonight and see if that helps as in the past that seems to have made a big difference. Paddock News Mowed the paddock today and it's looking okay. Very dry for this time of the year and as it says above we've had a bit of a knock about on it today (Sunday). Have a look at the video on youtube