Wednesday - Batting

Wanting to capitalise on the continuing enthusiasm for all this cricket, part of me was wary of it becoming an over-kill situation, but both Ben and Joe wanted to do more catching and fielding drills and some of that was going to be include the batting and bowling aspects.

Yesterday I'd noticed that as the ball each time had been returned to me, my left hand had started to suffer a little from all the catches, so I looked at how much a catchers mitt would cost to buy and while I was doing so, I also remembered that I'd also seen a CJI brand training bat and had been considering buying one for all of us. But looking at them I realised that what with all the bats I've got in the garage there must be one in there that I could modify and all I had to do is go down to the local wood yard and get the bloke to saw off the edges with his band saw. Ben liked the idea and we had a look through all the bats in the garage and found a really old one that I'd bought with a job lot of equipment for £40 off ebay (3 bats, keepers gloves, a bag and cricket shoes and some other stuff). This bat was one that a few times I'd thought about chucking as it looked homemade, but had kept it for mucking about with on concrete and stuff. But looking around it was the only one of the 'crap' bats that was left, so we thought we'd give it a go.

Twenty minutes later we'd had it cut and were sanding it down and getting it ready to have a knock about with. The bloke at the yard had initially been reluctant not sure whether becuase of the nature of the bats shape whether he'd be able to get a straight edge on it and end up pissing us off because he'd runined our bat. I assured him it didn't matter if it went wrong and he did a good job on it in the end.
Shaped up, fitted with a bat grip and sanded down it came up looking like this -

So this afternoon we had a repeat performance of yesterdays drills and games using the bat and out of everybody the person that seemed to get on with it the best was Ben and he used it predominantly straight although there is a caveat at this point in that we used a plastic ball all afternoon when playing the edge game. But just before tea some of the others went in and I got Ben to stay behind and have a go at facing some throw downs with it using a proper ball and we spent another half hour doing that and he batted superbly, hitting the ball 95% of time true and straight through the covers or back straight past me, and again for the most part along the ground and not in the air. I too had a go and found that by playing the shots properly I was able to middle it. But again I have to temper this enthusiasm and potential break-through with the fact that these were chuck downs and not full-length bowling.

So that's the next step - tomorrow in the paddock with the nets fully padded up for a proper batting session using this 75mm wide training bat and we'll see how we get on in there?