Here is another reblog, this time from Rick Walton’s cricketmanwales blog, on the challenges facing batting coaches in an era when describing a batsman’s technique as “textbook” can almost be seen as a criticism.
Includes links to a couple of fascinating batting masterclasses.
For those of you who already know Rick’s writing, you will know what to expect. For anyone who has not yet experienced the passion, the honesty of CricketManWales, you are in for a treat.
@cricketmanwales is asking the important question – what now for batting coaches? Have a read & have your say! 🏏❓❓❓
We can’t pretend nothing’s changed; everything’s changed. McCullum plays baseball cum tennis, with hands eight feet apart, off a wide, elasticated base. Pietersen says ‘kiss the ball’ – it’s all about head – and forget (or trust?) your feet. Nye Donald (a fair symbol for the next, irresistible generation?) has high, twitchy hands, intent on pulls and slaps – and he’s opening. The old certainties are buried.
Or are they?
All of us coaches at all of our levels are scrambling across the fallen masonry. It’s the age of the positive, the pre-emptive counter-attack, the bomb squad. Levels of change, development or challenge have become become so-o tectonically shifted it’s become unthinkable to deal in classical batting… or has it?
A series of Sky Sports Masterclasses have felt central to the annihilation of all we knew; or maybe they’ve simply enacted the moment of kerrplunk. Hussein and Key and Vaughan…
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