The Paddock

Still not using it at all and looking at ways I can work on it and get it ready for next year. Since putting the seed down it hasn't rained and in the middle of last week the council cut the grass in the paddock using a bit sit on Flymo type mower which has scattered all the seed and Top-Dressing everywhere especially up the batting area. I raked it all back again as much as I could and have just gone back to waiting for the rain. When it does rain I'll probably put more seed down, just to ensure a good even layer of new growth.

As you can probably gather from the stumps in the images I had a bit of a gentle bowl tonight as I've been working on my Biggun and doing pretty good with it. Although it's a re-occuring theme the thing I've noticed and have got to get in my head is that as far as my bowling is concerned when I bowl the ball the sensation needs to be that I'm bowling with the karate chop action. It's then that it turns big, if I don't bowl with the Karate chop action sensation the ball will come out as a small leg-break.

So it's looking like this at the moment.

Backyard Cricket in the square

No real cricket this weekend despite the fact that I had two options - a Sunday game with B&PCC and then just before going up to Derby for the weekend I had a call from Neil at B&PCC asking if I wanted to play on Saturday, which I'd have loved to but was going to be away first thing Saturday morning. All these offers when at the moment my bowing seems to be coming out well.

Backyard cricket in the square

This is our set up, as you can see it's pretty tight for space with houses and glass windows in close proximity. The rules are that any ball that comes directly off the bat that hits the areas coloured red are out, so balls going to square leg or point are out. Any balls going through the Off-side where the house are over 3' above the gound are out. Anything hit through the legside that goes over the wall or straight back past the bowler over the wall are also out.

The only real option for scoring runs are to hit the ball hard along the gound through the red zone below and get it past the bowler - they get you 2's and 4's depending on how well you hit them if there's just a couple of you playing. When there's a few players, the only way 4's are scored are if you hit the ball through the off-side between the bowler and Mid-Off as there's a pathway there and the ball will go 30 or 40 metres down the pathway.

The other thing we're focusing on as mentioned yesterday is building partnerships, so that the emphasis is not on the individuals score, but the combined score or any 2 batsmen and this is working as I said yesterday. Normally Ben and Joe are loathed to play together but yesterday they formed the best partnership and both seemed quite proud that they had done so and looked determined to better it and maintain that record, so that's very promising and something I'm quite pleased at achieving with them.

Backyard cricket

In recent weeks we've begun to use a little play area outside our house for backyard cricket. We've used it before, but we've kind of taken things a step further in order to hone some of our skills. The area is quite small so the wicket as such is very short, but the reason I've started to utilise it more is that it is surrounded by a fairly low wall on three sides and houses with windows on the Off-side. So the order of the day is that you've got to hit the ball along the ground and play shots straight down the wicket in between Mid-On and Mid Off. Anything that's more than 1.3 metres off the ground and you're either hitting windows or putting it over the wall in which case your out. Either side of where you bat in sillly positions are walls, so again, if the ball ends up in those areas in flight you're out too.

Instead of pictures here's a video clip from October (2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc6jGGwSuhQ

Tonight there were 4 or 5 of us out there playing at different times, so we had 2 bats a bowler and a wicket keeper and the objective was to form partnerships and get as many runs with your partner and we ended up with Joe and Ben (My sons) batting together the longest in a very sensible and measured manner getting singles and two's to win. Normally they're sworn enemies and simply refuse to bat together as it descends into confrontation and retribution when one or the other runs the other out. So it was good to see them keeping the ball on the ground, batting it into spaces where they'd pick up runs and communicating effectively in order to get the runs ticking over to go past the previous record held by my older son and me.

The other good thing is we're getting other non-cricket boys involved and maybe it might stick with a little more playing and work on them?

I'll try and get some pictures of the area and post them up and explain our rules, but they're pretty standard - one hand one bounce catches are allowed and then all the rules with regards going over walls and getting stuck in places that they can't be fielded. What I want to do is get some video clips going like these as I reckon these are good fun and a bit of a laugh. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhCmw6nPMEM&feature=related

To Spin or not to Spin

There's been some debate in the past as to whether there is any merit in bowling without any spin if you're struggling with your bowling. The concensus does seem to favour the opposing view that if you're a spinner, first and foremost the thing you must do is spin the ball and spin it hard. This theory is supported by Peter Philpott in his book 'The Art of Wrist Spin Bowling'. But, what if you came to spinning at such an early stage in your bowling development that you hadn't really honed any basic skills in bowling?

Is there not some merit in stepping back from months and months of frustration where perhaps you feel you're not going forward with your bowling and just having a good look at your basics? At one point I'd have argued that there was some value in this process and some time spent just assessing whether you could bowl in a straight line and hit the stumps might be a good idea? I then had a change of mind a while back whilst making some in-roads into bowling the Big Leg Break. My thoughts a few months back were that the Big Leg Break was so fundamentally important that no time should be spent tinkering with anything else and that you should focus entirely on Leg Breaks and the Big Leg Break.

I think I've softened on that viewpoint again and now might advocate that a basic sound bowling technique may be the pre-requisite to moving forward and learning wrist spin? The basis of this new opinion is that watching my younger son develop in his bowling he has gone through 3 distinct phases to date.

Phase 1: Initially with very little effort and no real technique with regards his explosion through the crease and follow through, he like many small boys could produce a leg break. This Leg Break because of the very slow and loopy flight and a degree of accuracy got him wickets.

Phase 2: Once he came up against boys that could bat a bit and was tonked around the park a bit, seam up bowling suddenly looked like a better solution and he went over to the darkside. During his 2 years in the seam up wilderness, because of his size and the fact that he is 2.5 years younger than his older seam up bowling brother he always compared himself to his older sibling. So for the 2 years he tried to bowl as fast as his brother, which was (In the short term) always going to be a battle that was going to be lost. But what did seem to happen was that he explored the Malinga round arm action and just trying to bowl much faster than he'd ever done. On his own with very little input from me he seemed to learn that varying the flight, length and speed worked if it coincided with accuracy.

During the phase 2 period, his whole bowling action improved along with physically growing. His bowling action by the start of this summer looked more like that of a spinner with a slow walk-in buidling up to the explosion through the crease, with a spinners follow through.

Phase 3: That's kind of happened in the last 2-3 months or so. Around June he started to bowl Wrong Uns http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUG6g9VLyd8 that turned quite a bit and asking questions about them. "So it's just by turning my wrist and bowling out of the back of my hand that I bowl a Googly"? This was then followed up with questions about the Leg Break once I'd said "You don't really want to be bowling Googlies, otherwise you'll end up with the Googly Syndrome". I simply explained that he needed to be bowling out of the front of the hand with a flick of the wrist having the ball come off the 3rd finger.

Then last week we were mucking about outside the house and he bowled a series of lovely Leg-Breaks and when asked about it he said "I'm just flicking my wrist when I release the ball".

In conclusion: It strikes me that he made enormous progress whilst bowling straight not trying to get the ball to turn. During that Phase 2 the very fundamental elements of bowling were laid down allowing him to then recently add the flicking of the wrist either way to bowl the Leg-Break and the Wrong Un?

Wicket maintainence in the Paddock

Today I purchased some cheapo grass seed from B&Q two quid fifty a pack and started the process of establishing some new growth at the batting end to start off with as it's sustained quite a bit of damage. So, first up Joe and I gave it a good rake and loosened up the surface and got rid of any leaves and stones that were on the surface.

Once it was raked I seeded the area quite heavily using virtually a whole packet. Once that was done I used the rest of yesterday bucket of Top Dressing to cover the seeds over and level off any areas that looked as though they needed some attention. Surprisingly the surface was relatively dry despite some rain earlier in the day. When the seed went down it was warm (17.5 degrees C) so only a little moisture and the continuation of this fine weather should see the seed germinate quite quickly. I'm guessing 7-10 days.

So this image above is how it looks once the seed had been sown and the top-dressing put down.

The other end needs a lot of work still and I'm going off the idea that maybe we bat at this end next year. In this section here were we run- in you can see that there's a lot of wear. But in addition to a fair bit of repair work there's also a lumpy uneven section on the left hand side so over the last 2 days I've been gradually raking the lump away and raking it over the run-in area as a whole just to get it a lot more even. So far that's working okay and I'll continue to spread the earth around and get a large area flat. I suppose if I do this and do get it flat there maybe an option next year of batting at this end - but it's not something I'll be doing intentionally.

Some obvious stuff here that wouldn't have been in the Daily Mail or the Sun

http://www.ifs.org.uk/pr/progressive_budget.pdf

Sunday and Monday

It's a cricket filled weekend with cricket all over the place! Joe again today continued with his Leg Breaks but the practice was curtailed for a short periodwhen I hit a ball which hit him right on the end of the nose square! But he picked himself up, brushed himself down and got on with it and as with yesterday he bowled well.

Currently what with the Paddock now kind of de-commissioned while it recovers, I've been looking at other ways and ideas of getting Ben and Joe to play and practice. The main thing I'm trying to get them to do is to drive the ball and play with a straight bat. So I've been trying to devise methods to encourage this. One thing I did was play opposite my garage entrance and bowl from there only giving runs if the ball went in the garage having go directly past me either side. We used a really soft sponge ball as well so that anyone could catch it as the length of the wicket was 25'-30' and the objective was to hit the ball late so that it came off the ground and couldn't be caught.

Bit by bit they both more of less got that and started playing correct shots -straight and late. We've not moved into a walled square opposite our house. On three sides behind, in front and to the on-side. The walls only chest height and over it are cars, gardens and things that shouldn't be hit by a Readers Windball, so any balls over the wall are 'Out'. On the Off-side there a short section of wall that ends just in front of point so any balls hitting that wall in the air are out and on the opposite side the same applies to a section of wall that's covered by Square Leg. The rest of the Off-side is the front of peoples houses in close proximity to the game so any balls above chest height are going to go through the windows! So basically the only options are straight controlled drives through the areas inside Mid On and Mid Off. Or balls down the Leg-side kept low, or late cuts through cover again if they're low and not in the air. Slowly it looks like it's working and it's in this square that Joe's developing his Leg-Break.

Sunday

I'm off to Chelmsford with B&PCC again to play a team we played a few weeks back which was an okay game and I bowled okay in, so that'll be interesting. I've done very little practice since going on holiday enthused by the fact that my Plantar Fasciitis has improved with the decrease in practice and playing. Longer term I don't know what the answer is because I'd like to play next season. It'll be interesting to see how well or badly I bowl with the decrease in practice. I've found in the past that there is a some benefit sometimes in not practicing because I get into bad practice and kind of lose my way and then if I stop and come back to it I bowl better?

Monday

Bank Holiday and despite the rain today and the prospect of some rain tomorrow Monday looks set to be fine with the temp a warmish 19 degrees. Monday for B&PCC is 'Fun Day' which last year was an excellent event and something I'm really looking forward to. Loads of extra kids turn up and have a go and there's just non-stop cricket all day. Dads v Lads, Dads V Dads and coaches mixed in. Mums v Mums and all sorts. We're taking people that wouldn't normally go, along with their boys and the day should be really good fun. With it being Dads v Dads there's a vague chance I might get a run or two, but I wouldn't put any money on it.

Paddock Repairs & Maintainence

After all the recent rain and the paddock looking a bit healthier we decided that we'd do some maintainence today. So we brought out the newly acquired petrol mower, along with the Ransomes Ajax and gave it a bit of a cut, roll and repair.




The blades are set high on both mowers at this time of year so as to not cut it too short. The petrol mower did most of the hard work and got rid of 80% of the grass and then we tided it up using the Ransomes Ajax. With so little attention paid to the wicket since June when the dry weather set in and it cracked and turned to powder almost, the surface was fairly uneven and this was noticeable when using the petrol mower.



As yet I've not been able to identify the petrol mower and I'm not that impressed with it yet, but I reckon with some adjustment and with the wicket a little less lumpy it may be okay.



The kids were recruited to help which they did willingly with the prospects of mucking about with a petrol mower. The roller was also deployed and once I'd filled some holes and did some repairs and levelling we gave it a light rolling. Just as we were finishing up it rained which was good as it'll help all the repaired holes to bed in. The main thing I'm short of that I need to get especially at this point in the year is seed. If the weather continues as it is at the minute, we'll get new growth established really quickly and it'll possibly get some good root growth going before the winter sets in and halts the growth of the grass.


Here I am doing the repairs using a 50/50 mix of clay and organic material (Household compost). I'll try and get a shot of the paddock tomorrow and maybe purchase some grass seed and get it down as there's more rain on the way. At the minute in the North Atlantic there are 3 low pressure weather systems including 2 low catergory Hurricanes which will all filter through to our weather system over the next 4-8 days.

Joe finds his Leg Break

My younger son Joe did that thing when he was younger where he just somehow naturally bowled Leg Breaks. That combined with the fact that he bowled accurately, loopy and with varying pace and flight he was very successful against kids of his age that could play a bit of cricket and anyone else (including adults and me) that chose to pick up a bat and face him. There's the time in 2008 when we were on holiday on a campsite with a group of kids that included U11 and U13 club players he took 9 wickets for less than 30 runs. But not long after that he joined his club and was exposed to fast bowling and suffered being batted out of the park by kids that were good with the bat. I think this undermined his belief in slow bowling and he bought into the idea having seen Lasith Malingas 4 wickets in a row in the 2007 world cup, that fast was best and that if you want wickets you're best off bowling fast.

His Richie Benaud vertcial bowling action disappeared as he bowled more and more trying to copy Malinga and bowling faster. In the end I had to stop trying to get him to revert back to bowling wrist spin and let him find his own way and perhaps end up going over to the Darkside with aspirations of being a pace bowler when he's older and bigger.

Fortunately, I think like a lot of brothers he has a sibling rivalry thing going on and his older brother Ben who is primarily a pace bowler doesn't serve the purpose of being someone to aspire to. The net effect is that Joe, no matter how fast he tries to bowl, he can't ever get anywhere near the same speed as Ben because there's a big physical difference across the 2.5 year age gap. But rather than own up to this and recognise the fact that Ben is a better pace bowler, I think Joe has kept trying to bowl straight maybe waiting for it to come right with the speed and has kind of ended up being a slow bowler that doesn't intentionally turn the ball. In the last two seasons his wickets have come through primarily bowling straight, flighting the ball and varying the speed from loopy and very slow, through slow and quite a bit faster.

This has served him well and he's okay with how it's going. I've had to keep a very low profile, hands off and don't say anything approach unless of course it's by way of encouragement. But then over the last couple of months he's drifted into bowling Wrong Uns that turn out of the back of the hand in conjunction with his slightly faster balls. Whether this delivery is used in games or not I don't know - but in practice he uses it to good effect http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUG6g9VLyd8

But tonight playing in the square where I've devised a game to get their batting techniques better he started to bowl ripping Leg Breaks that had me bowled 6 times for 6 runs off of 36 balls! (Yeah I am crap). But the first ball which I just thought had just come out of his hand wrong to produce the Leggie turned perfectly from outside of Leg right across me almost clipping my hands as it passed the off-stump!

"Whoa Joe! That was a Leg Break there"! I said in surprise and he smiled, but then the next ball bowled on a middle stump line I played a straight drive to and it turned away from the edge of the bat just missing it!
"Joe your bowling Leg Breaks"!
"Yeah I know". He answered nonchalently. I asked him what he was doing different and he showed me his grip (2 up 2 down) and how he was flicking his wrist as he bowled. Sure enough the next 36 balls I watched and the majority of them had the seam which is clearly visible rotating perfectly to get the leg-break! But then he started mixing it up bowling top-Spinners and Wrong Uns and down went my wicket again and again.

I was well chuffed and so was he and we played for over an hour and half whereas I'd usually expect a game outside the house to last for 20 - 30 minutes before his enthusiasm waned. Could this mean that Joe after a couple of years in the bowling wilderness has returned to the fold and is once again a Wrist Spinner? Let's hope so eh?

England v Pakistan

This post is somewhat different to my usual stuff, but todays match was pretty special.

I’d imagine that this morning sitting inside Lords having bought your ticket several months ago and seeing yesterdays debacle, sitting there freezing your nadgers off waiting for the game to start the prospects of a positive outcome must have been dismally limited?

At some point during the day just after lunch a mate of mine asked ‘Are you watching the cricket’ (The scorecard ticking over)? His eyes rolling in despair giving the game away.
“No – don’t say anything, I’ll watch the highlights on channel 5 later on”. Thank God channel 5 have the rights to at least broadcast the highlights of what is almost our national game, but that’s a different argument. His shoulders shrugged in disappointment at not being able to tell me how crap Cook, Strauss, Pisterson et al were and that they’d no doubt all been bowled out by Amir and Asif and the series was on course to go Pakistan’s way. For a moment I reflected on Strauss’s and Pieterson’s batting and got back to work thinking that the rain would probably put paid to any chance of their being anything vaguely exciting to watch.

Just before 7pm Joe and me started to have a knock about on the play area outside the house and out of no-where Joe suddenly re-discovered his Leg-Break bowling me 6 times for 6 runs!! 4 wickets with his leggie, one a lovely wrong un and another a top-spinner when I was playing for a leg-break!!! So what with all that going on, I skipped indoors and put a tape on and recorded the cricket. Once it got too dark we came in and I noticed that the tape had finished and had rewound itself back to the beginning so I wasn’t sure whether I’d managed to record the whole lot and was a bit disappointed that I might miss some of it.

I found the start and started to watch it. Being the highlights Cook was soon gone cheaply which was disappointing after his recent 100 +, but then one after another England’s finest, the blokes that have got to do battle against the Aussies in a few months time followed. But the nature of how they followed was a killer. Mark Nicholas the Channel commentator commented “If you’re watching this collapse on the highlight program, this isn’t highlights, this is in real time”!

Pieterson gone for 0 first ball the commentators virtually writing the bloke off and out of the England set up before the Ashes saying, that he’d written in a column yesterday admitting that he’s lost it, Collingwood momentarily looking good with some good defensive blocks, my spirit lifted and then gone for 0. Morgan the bright new hope who will lift the Ashes next year?……. Gone for 0. Then Matt Prior, he got the ball on the bat and was making runs, a sigh of relief….. maybe we could survive? But then gone for 22. Trott was there ticking over runs, but now with only bowlers left to support him it was looking grim. Amir the 18 year old Pakistani bowler was incredible! Swann joined the queue, 2nd ball and gone for….. yeah you guessed it 0. Aussies all over the world must have been watching or listening with big beaming smiles, especially Ricky Ponting.

Stuart Broad joined the queue of English batsman to go before Amir to be dismissed for a humiliating and psychologically crushingly low score. There was no hope, all the English batsmen had demonstrated that they’d met their match in Amir. But then cricket did that thing that makes it special. We’d been entertained with some spectacular bowling by Amir and it looked like a totally and utterly lost cause, but then bit by bit Stuart Broad a No8 batsman along with Jonathan Trott the No.3 dug in and started to play proper Test Cricket, a run here and a run there and slowly the runs began to tick over and Pakistan took their foot off the accelerator and England looked as though they may be able to get some runs on the board to give the bowlers a chance. Trott reached his 50 and then there was the 100 partnership, then Trott reached his hundred with Broad 35-40 runs off his, but it was inconceivable after this morning that Broad would go on to attain his all time test batting record? But he did, and then he went past his all time 1st class batting record and it was looking like the 100 was within his grasp! The 90’s arrived and Michael Vaughn commented on the fact that there would be adrenalin and other factors working against Broard to deny him of his 100. 98 and then eventually the glory of getting 100 at Lords!

What a moment, that must have been for Broad, in this one game he broke a whole bunch of records and PB’s and by the end of the game England or rather Stuart Broad and Jonathan Trott had taken the game from a score of 102 for 7 to 346 for 7 with more records to be taken tomorrow and the potential to put England in a strong position what with the weather improving and something that the bowlers can work with.

What an incredible match and day that must have been for all those thousands that must have been sitting there this morning in the gloom before the match wondering when the rain might start.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/england/latest_scorecard/default.stm