Again another lovely warm and sunny day! 16 Degrees today, sunshine and blue skies and as Joe was off on a birthday do with one of his mates Ben and I went over the Rec and had a knock about.
Instead of using the deserted courts side to side which limits your run (Bens especially) we set up the stumps along the length so that Ben could run in and bowl and it went okay. I reckon my batting may have slightly improved over the last 12 months against faster bowlers and this maybe down to batting against Ben as his bowling as he gets older gets faster. I don't thiink I'll be any better against Offies, but saying that, the last game I had I managed to survive against an Offie, albeit only 4 or 5 balls.
Against faster bowlers I'm only looking to block them when the ball is on the stumps, but if the ball doesn't look threatening I can't seem to capitalise on it because my timing is very poor, how that comes together in the longer term I don't know, but I keep trying with Ben but as yet I have no solutions for getting the ball away for runs.
Bowling
As well as bowling at Ben in the earlier part of the day I went back later and had a bowl on my own because my run in has changed and I seemed to have lost my rythmn a little. Someone noted on Youtube that my run in had lost its dynamic bound and they were right because the bound was a little heavy and it kind of changed over the summer to become a little more balletic and springy. So I had a look at that this afternoon, looking at whether I could change between the light springy approach and a faster more dynamic apporoach and in the end it kind of proved to be a bit inconclusive as to which was better or worse still which felt better. So that may prove to be a hinderence in the nets in January?
When I turned up at the nets there was a bloke there with his son stumps and everything and he was keeping to him and it turned out that this bloke was a Chinaman bowler. I had a chat with them and it turns out that the Dad was originally from Sri-Lanka and that he has connections with the coaches of the national team and the lad who was 14 but about 5'11" had been practicing with the under 19 national squad. They were also members of Horndon on the Hill CC which is just down the road. I told them about our set up in the tennis courts and suggested they come down for a knock about next Saturday or Sunday, so perhaps we'll have a couple of extra players next week if the weather holds out.
