The Teesra

Category: batting

  • Online coach development — more than just “telling”, surely?

    A Twitter contact (X contact?) posted this the other day.

    Excerpted from ECB research into helping coaches “develop potential international batters”

    Anything that increases time spent playing at the expense of deconstructed “skill drills” is going to find favour with an advocate for the ecological dynamics and a constraints-led approach (like me!).

    So I’d buy into this as an underlying coaching philosophy, although the numbers look low, too me. Only 50% “play” for young players — so the rest is still chores?. And just 40% “…highly random and game-based…”?

    But there’s surely a problem with “broadcast coach development”.

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  • 40 years of bat

    40 years of bat

    I posted a couple of months ago about my cricketing 50th anniversary — 50 years since I first played, back in 1973. And I have just realised that I am using a bat that is modelled on one I bought 40 years ago.

    The face is just about held together with tape!
    Not that clear in the pic, but the bat is split from toe to splice!
    My original GN500

    Not quite Trigger’s broom (or Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus, for the more Classically-minded), but there is a direct lineage from my old Gray-Nicolls GN500 to the bat(s) I have used this season with the Essex Seniors over60s.

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  • The secret batting drill that “they” don’t want you to know about! /clickbait

    The secret batting drill that “they” don’t want you to know about! /clickbait

    In the middle of last season, I was asked to move up the order to push the scoring rate along. I knew that I could not do this by batting conventionally — I do like a stodge!

    So I resolved to apply (my interpretation of) Julian Wood’s theory of power hitting for cricketers — not slogging, but a technique to put bat on ball, consistently, and with force behind each hit. And it seemed to work.†

    Whilst it is far from fully thought through, yet, there is some theory behind my switch from “batting” to “hitting”, and the practice (that clickbait “drill” in the title) to develop the technical and mental approach needed to implement the switch.

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