If you've seen the posts and the comments over at
bigcricket I've made over the last few weeks, you'll have seen that I was concerned slighty over the issue of using the Sidearm in conjunction with training with kids. The Sidearm Pro works really well with balls around standard cricket ball size including Hockey balls which I've been using on tarmac in order to get used to the device. Outside the house mucking around and trying it out with different balls we soon found that we could also use the
Sidearm with
Readers windballs accurately with only a slight modification in the slinging action. This lead me to visualising a practice scenario in the
Paddock and I soon realised this would be enhanced if we had a lot of windballs so we could sling a load before we collected them up, but then that would mean buying £36 worth of windballs. The obvious solution would have been to use tennis balls, but we'd tested those and they're unusable with the Sidearm Pro.
The next solution I came up with was to maybe look at buying a Dog Throwing version which I know can chuck tennis balls and could be used with
Slazenger Red Ball which have far less bounce and a lot more weight than a regular tennis ball. But this afternoon when I went over the Rec tennis courts for a bowl I took three of the Slazenger Red Balls and gave them a go and lo and behold they work and at £1.00 a go I reckon I can stretch to 12 of those for practice with Ben and Joe this spring. This also means that the Slidearm Pro despite being designed for full size balls seemingly is probably going to be okay with the youth size cricket balls as well.
Check out my other blog here - this is all about Leg-spin bowling and nothing else. Double click on the image below.
