Weekend weather

Not looking very promising - http://magicseaweed.com/UK-Ireland-MSW-Surf-Charts/1/pressure/in/

Fingers crossed - we'll see what happens. If it does screw up though I'll look at it as time for my foot to get better from the bout of athletes foot that I'm suffering from at the moment.

Weather

The weather here in Essex has been remarkably dry and the weather that's forecast for the next few days is the first drop of real rain (If it happens) for weeks and weeks. Looking at the longer term forecast on the BBC weather website it looks as though by Thursday the weather may change for the better as there's a big high pressure zone on it's way and it's going to be pulling warm air from places like Africa and Portugal and the pressure is predicted to be 1020 milibars so that should mean a warm and sunny! That's something to look forward to.

Athletes Foot remedy

Has anyone tried this and had any success - it's a bit "Voodoo" but I like all these "Voodoo" techniques and it includes some ingredients that have been tested against all sorts of ailments for over 3000 years (garlic and vinegar) so I'm optimistic.

2 x crushed garlic cloves with 4 x table spoons of cider vinegar in 2 pints of warm water, soak it for 15 minutes a day and it's supposed to disappear within a matter of days.

Sunday 9th March

All day long the weather threatened our scheduled stint over at Five Tree Field and just as I was getting Ben and Joe ready to drive over there it started to spit and the clouds really blackened up. We went for it as Thomas had already phoned and said that he would meet us there with one of his kids and as I expected as we drove away from our house a difference of half a mile meant that we drove out of the heavier rain.

This morning I'd been to a DIY shop and dropped into Sports World having remembered that last year they were selling off cricket gear really cheaply and Joe was needing a new bat. I'd almost bought one off of EBAY which would have been too big and would have cost me along with the postage in the region of £15. I managed to get a Duncan Fearnly kids cricket kit - bat, 4 stumps and a ball for £4.00 so I was well chuffed, but on paying for it discovered in fact that it was £2.00! The original price was £19.99 how gutted would you be if you'd bought it at that price!

So once over there the kids set up there own stumps and played across from us and we had a knock about in the middle. Thomas made the point that today last year (His Daughters birthday) was warm and the kids were wearing T-shirts, whereas today it grey and cold at 10 degrees centigrade.

The practice went okay, no-one else joined us, we were hoping that Richard and Rod the Aussie may have turned up, but they didn't. Still no sign of the locals either - I'm beginning to think that we wont actually see them till the clocks go back now? So as usual it was just Thomas and me. We did the thing where we set a certain amount of runs to score off an over - 10 runs. Normally without the pressure Thomas is hitting the ball all over the shop, but then once you do this it's a different story all together and suddenly my bowling takes on a new dimension. Most of the time I'm forcing errors and he'd be caught easily, but he'd be the first to admit that he's not a good batsman - he's very strong and has got a very good eye to ball ability but he doesn't know the strokes and rarely plays defensively. But as I said - with the pressure on I am far more affective. It would be really interesting to have a few more people turn up and I'm seriously thinking maybe we should get people like Mark Soye, Nick Naughty and Terry back in the game? I wonder if Darren would be up for it as well?

Overall it was a good session I stuck to the 3 balls - Top Spinners, Wrong Uns and Flippers. The Flipper with Thomas being left handed is like a Wrong Un for him and I was getting it to turn quite well and I turned the ball into his nuts a couple of times and the Wrong Un worked well too turning a lot in some cases. So overall using the 3 variations with Thomas under pressure seemed to work well. I still need more variety in form of different batting approaches, so I'm looking forward to anyone else joining us. I also had a bat and managed again to get the bat on the ball a few times, but even though I managed to whack it hard a few times the ball wasn't going that far and the bat feels quite dead - it's a Gunn and Moore bat one of the cheap ones, so I don't know whether it's just a crap bat, I may try one of the others I've got and see if they're any better?


At the end of the session I also marked out the South East quadrant with boundary markers, so now half the pitch is marked out. We noticed today that the West side boundary which has brambles and bushes is a short boundary and will cause a problem with lost balls potentially once we get some good batsmen playing, but we'll just have to sort that problem out once it arises.

Athletes Foot?

Here's a first, tonight I've developed a really itchy foot and then noticed a rash between my toes that is itchy. I've looked it up and it does sound like athletes foot from all the descriptions I've read - I'm not pleased. I'm not sure whether I've caught it from a pair of secondhand cricket shoes or from the swimming pool where Ben and Joe have their lessons? The shoes I've had for months, so I'd have thought that this would have occured sooner - so I'm hoping it's the pool? What I'll do is ask on the cricket forum for ideas as to how to best combat it.

Tomorrow

Hopefully we'll miss most of the rain tomorrow and it'll be quite dry and I'll be able to face a few balls from Rod if he turns up. Rod's quite a good bowler medium pacer with some in-swing, so it'll be useful to see if the fact that I'm now using my feet a bit will help with my batting against him. Also with the bowling we'll do that thing where the batsman has to try and score a specific amount of runs off an over, that's far more realistic to play in that way and I get wickets when we do. Fingers crossed some of the locals will turn up as well or at least the one bloke that did before?

Bit of a practice

Had an hour today under leaden skies and threatening rain. Went okay despite the blustery wind, tried a few things out but I'm kind of settling with the idea that I'm going to concentrate on the my three main variations Top Spinner, Wrong Un and Flipper and see how I get on with them through the year. The Leg break it just looks as though it's a lost cause unless I get someone to have a look at it and give me one to one coaching. I'll try every now and then, but I'm not hopeful.

I also measured out the boundary and put down some markers in the North East quadrant. So if we go over there tomorrow I'll do another quadrant and that'll be half of the pitch marked out already. I've still not seen anything more of the other blokes which is a shame, but I'm sure it'll happen eventually. I noticed today amongst the trees there's an electrical box of some sort, which is ideal for putting a poster on. So if it pans out that they start playing and I keep missing them I could possibly post a notice on this box?

Did some exercises today - the band stretching behind the head things - 20 of those, five of those weird round the head with the bendy bar things. Press ups walking side to side on the hands and the plank with legs stretched out alternatley. I'll do some again tonight.

The weather has held out okay, it didn't rain as expected in the manner they'd alluded to e.g. absolutely pouring down. It rained for a short while lightly but then it stopped and the remainder of the day has been dry. It's supposed to rain badly tonight and I'm waiting to see the news and weather.

Saw Rod the Aussie and Thomas tonight at Thomas's kids party and he's up for knock about and he might bring his son who plays a bit and is 13, so if it doesn't rain that'll be something to look forward to.

Meeting with the Council

I had a meeting this morning with the Council and that went well. The Council are very interested in helping us as much as possible. They're slightly concerned about the fact that cricket pitches are being under-used and so they're definitely interested in the potential that we might be able to form a team and make use of the facilities.

With regards the flattening/preparing of the wicket at the "5 tree field" (Gloucester Park) they're bound by H&S regulations and couldn't go anywhere near the idea that they might partially "Prepare" the ground in any way even if it was to drive along the length of the wicket in thier vehicles to smooth it out a bit. As he pointed out there are 2 wickets only a matter of a few hundred yards away that are prepared and maintained properly.

So the situation is that in the short term I've still got to forge contacts with the Gloucester Park blokes and get them playing at the "Five Tree Field" and try and get them to play cricket properly with real balls and get the basis of a team together. If I can do that it may pan out that sometime in the summer they we'd be in a position to hire either Murray Fields or The Rec a couple of times and play a real match.

The Council have said that at any time once this is beginning to take shape if we give them a couple of days notice they'd take us around the facilities and show the others what's on offer. I was shown the pavillion at The Rec and it's quite impressive inside - showers, kitchen, and several rooms - enough for 4 different teams.

In the short term the main thing as always is that I meet with the Gloucester Park crew and get some practice sessions going on the Five Tree Field. I must admit I have come away from the meeting not quite sure how they'd feel if I started to mow a wicket at Gloucester Park?

Exercise log update

Exercises and stuff - still being lazy.

The season fast approaches and unfortunately for me my teams net practice happens on a night when I have to work late, so as far as getting some coaching from the other Leg Spinners in my team I'm restricted to the possibility of a few sessions in the school holidays. So with regards to my action and any advice as to how I might go forward I'm restricted to video-ing myself and uploading the results to Youtube and you blokes comment and I hope to do more of that as the weather gets better.
Back home though I'm still finding it difficult to motivate myself especially with regards to running/sprinting, I kind of regard myself as an asset in my team because despite my age I'm quite fast and agile and enjoy fielding and chasing down balls so I need to focus on this aspect of my game fairly soon.
The only things I seem to be doing is stretching those big elastic bands behind my head, press-ups where you walk from side to side and the plank. Again not lots of it - every other day.
Eating is pretty much the same loads of fruit and veg and usual English quisine in the evenings. Looking to substitute my breakfast mixture of cheerios, bran flakes and Rice Krispies for something with oats in with sultana's and dried apricots. Still can't give up chocolate, although I may have slightly reduced the amount I eat recently, but that's been driven by economics rather than a desire to reduce my intake.

The weekend ahead #2

Looks like rain this weekend is going to scupper any plans for cricket, although looking at the surf maps on http://www.magicseaweed.com/ it looks as though there'll be a lot of rain Saturday, but then it clears through Saturday night leaving a lull throughout the day on Sunday to return again over Sunday night. I'll keep an eye on the situation and see if it improves.

I've been trying to get Richard Sainsbury to get involved along with Thomas and me, but he keeps coming up with excuses - current one is he's got to rub down his bannister. He's got a nice Centurion bat that's only ever made contact with a ball thrown in anger about 3 times and each time it ended up in someones mits and I think last year he went for 3 ducks! This is a bloke who in the nets looks quite handy and played cricket quite a lot as a youth, so if he doesn't get out and practice surely he runs the risk of the bat never ever being used again? I keep asking him if he wants to sell it, but he insists that he'll play again at some point.

This Friday I go and meet the Council bloke who looks after all the fields in our area including Great Berry Open Space and The Rec. I'm expecting we'll have a chat about what options are open to us this summer. As I said in an earlier entry I'm speculating as to whether any cricket teams are using the Rec on a weekly basis, which is a real shame if they're not, but I think he may offer it to us at discounted prices? The only thing is "Us" at the moment is at best 5 blokes until I can get the Gloucester Park blokes on board and that may not be possible because of the cultural and language barriers and the fact that I've got to get their trust in order that the idea of a team can be come something more tangible. I'm not that optimistic - I reckon I can forge friendships and make something happen at the 5 tree field, but to get them to move out of their comfort zone and over to either Great Berry or The Rec would be more problematic.

On a slightly different front I had a look at the cost of hiring plant - specifically sit-on compactors. I was quite surprised at how cheap they are to hire. A week would cost you £180 for a compactor with 2 massive rollers over 3' wide. That's well within the realms of any cricket club to hire one for a week and flatten/compact their wicket. Imagine if you had one for that amount of time, you could guarantee your wicket to be rock hard and solid! I would assume that they're delivered on some kind of low loader trailer. Whether that'd be possible to get a trailer of that description and it's lorry onto somewhere like Great Berry is another matter, but if the council was involved I'm sure it'd be possible?

5 Tree field update

Went over today with Ben and Joe with the prospect of them getting really bored whilst I practiced bowling. So in order to limit the chance of that happening I loaded the car up with footballs, scooters and the 2 bikes on a bike rack on the back of the car which had to be fitted, so geting all that together on it's own took the best part of 20 minutes.

As soon as we got there out of nowhere they wanted to play cricket and were asking for all their gear! Gutted! All I had was a Kookaburra plastic type windball and a full size bat. Needless to say we all percevered with the big bat and had a bit of fun. Ben's bowling was good and Joes too both hitting the stumps a few times.

I then a had a practice on my own which went okay - concentrating on Top-spinners, Flippers and wrong uns. It went okay - again I have to make comparisons with last year and in that regard it was a good practice. I desperately need other people to be involved in these practices and again I was hoping to see some of the local blokes and still there wasn't any sign of any of them. I'm looking forward to the Easter as if the weather breaks and it's fine that may bring them out on to the field? Again in the short term I might try and get some of the MPA boys involved?

I measured the boundary as well today and it looks as though the perimeter is approx just about right, maybe a bit short 60 yards instead of the usual 65 yards and it'll definitely be an oval shape with the longer boundaries behind the batsman and the bowler. I've started to mark the boundary out already having marked all the 1/4 markings. I've also obtained some pipe to use as boundary markers in the same way that GCCC use and there's the potential for using 32 of these, but in the short term I'll mark the boundary in the same way as I do the actual wicket.

I realised today what with Ben and Joe wanting to play cricket I need to have more of my gear with me when I go over there, so I'll have to take 2 bags of gear with me to cover all eventualities. It might be an idea to make some kind of wheeled device to drag it all from the car to the field being as it's so bloody heavy and there's a lot of it!

I've been increasing my exercises recently and modifying some of them. The Plank for instance I'm now doing for 30 seconds as a normal and then lifting alternate legs for 30 seconds. Other than that the stretching bands behind the head, press ups and upper body stuff is all increasing. How this will affect my bowling I'm not sure, I always feel like I have a propensity to bowl too long and getting stronger might exacerbate this even further? I'll have to see what happens.