The Teesra

Category: TGfU

Teaching Games for Understanding

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • Adaptive formats in cricket — good for…anything?

    Clubs in England have been able to play cricket for nearly a month, now.

    It’s not cricket as we know it, perhaps, but recreational cricket is back [1]. T20 & 40 over, mostly, from what I have seen, but with multiple junior formats.

    Perhaps it is easy to forget, now, the trepidation around the dreaded phrase “adapted” (or was it “adaptive”) gameplay that was promised by the ECB’s roadmap for the return of recreational cricket.

    Because the original version of the ECB Roadmap described a step 4 of “socially distanced matches” with

    • COVID-19 adaptations for adult cricket
    • COVID-19 adaptations for junior cricket
    • Shorter formats — to allow more matches to take place…

    And that third bullet received an especially blunt response on my twitter timeline:

    “If it’s 8-a-side, 20 overs, then I’m not playing.”

    I can just about see this for adult, recreational cricket — you pay your money for a game on Saturday afternoon, and you want a game. Maybe T20 doesn’t cut it, for you. For some, it’s a run chase and a result, for others, a few hours respite from the day-to-day worries.

    But is a 40-over bash, with little context, really going to be that satisfying? Might something more deliberately “developmental” have been a better way to spend the truncated summer of 2020?

    And for junior cricket, what format might give players the opportunity to learn more about the game?

    What follows is a lengthy, almost entirely subjective, analysis of what constitutes a “good” format — it reflects what I believe (based on 45 years playing experience, 10 years coaching), with no empirical data to back it up. Of course, you are free to disagree…just apply your own rules to justify what you do. But don’t do something without thinking through why.

    (more…)

  • 360° Cricket…this time with words

    I posted a Teesra Talks podcast on this topic a a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t think it had many listens, and the format doesn’t really invite any responses. If you have listened, there is not much new in this blog post. But for everyone else — some thoughts on making a game more relevant.

    I do love playing games, but I worry that sometimes the skills developed don’t always transfer obviously to “the real thing”. And I want to enthuse youngsters (and anyone) to actually want to play cricket, in any of its formats.

    Hence my attempts to tweak cricket-based games and gamified drills to make them more like cricket (or, at least, to teach skills, tactics, or general awareness, that might transfer to the game of cricket), and less like games for the sake of games.

    (more…)