The Teesra

Category: player development

technical, tactical, physical

  • Belonging; learning together

    Fascinating post from Harry Curtin, on Substack, on how he modified his school rugby coaching sessions to focus on promoting connectedness within a team environment and to move from having the coach explicitly coaching to allowing the players (collaboratively) to learn.

    And it set me trying to think of a similar approach in cricket.

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  • Where does the “meta-learning” & socialisation happen? Or — there has to be more to cricket coaching than hitting and bowling.

    Where does the “meta-learning” & socialisation happen? Or — there has to be more to cricket coaching than hitting and bowling.

    Back in the day, schoolboy cricketers (and it was, almost exclusively, boys, back then) played ay school, and were invited to play “adult” cricket, initially to make up the numbers and do the running around for the older players.

    But a lot of essential learning happened in the game, talking and watching, often in the bar after the game.

    Understanding how to win. How not to lose so often. Why a bowler might prefer an unorthodox field setting. How to get on with the rest of the team.

    But that learning opportunity has largely been lost.

    Partly because young players are not being led astray, into the bar, as used to happen. Probably not a bad thing!

    But also as the organised pathways develop, and more youth cricket is played, young players possibly get to play less with more experienced players.

    And I think that loss of exposure to more experienced players might need to be addressed.

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  • Review — “Something in the Water: The Story of England’s Football Talent Hotbeds”. And some thoughts on “natural” talent development environments.

    Interesting conversation on Xtter last week on talent development in English football, and the next generation of superstars.

    So Callum Murray’s Something in the Water: The Story of England’s Football Talent Hotbeds provided some very timely background reading, with a case-study of the emergence of south London as a hotbed of soccer talent development,

    Front cover of “Something in the Water”, by Callum Murray. Four footballers set against the background of a brick wall with a football goal painted on it.

    Murray identifies some of the factors common across old and new hotbeds — working class communities with strong community support for children and their aspirations, space (and time) to play — but goes on to address some of the reasons why south London is now outperforming areas in the north of England that have traditionally produced disproportionate numbers of top footballers.

    And there could, perhaps, be cross-over for cricket, and other sports, looking for new talent.

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