“Four tent pegs” – twist

Very interesting blog post from Steffan Jones (former County player/coach (Somerset CC, and Derbyshire CC, ECB Level 3 & UKSCA Certified) and a Strength & Conditioning expert), on the “four tent pegs” drill, as expounded by Ian Pont.

“Drop step and block” (go on, buy the book!) certainly feels like a very dynamic start to an explosive delivery, and the whole drill offers a solid set of basic principles for bowling fast.

But the video highlights one challenge I have to the tent pegs, and that is the transition from “tent peg 1” (essentially, back foot landing) to “tent  peg 2”.

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Performance goals (2) – putting some numbers against the targets

There has been an interesting discussion on the LinkedIn group “Cricket Coaches Worldwide” about the use of fielding analysis data recording at club level.  The (mostly full-time?) coaches are collecting more and more detailed data about every aspect of the game, and using it to inform training and development planning.

But one of the challenges that the coaches identified was that of data quality – you can spend your day (or allocate someone else’s day) to collecting all manner of match-day stats, but they can only be as useful as the analysis that you perform (and the insight drawn from the analyses).

I wondered if there were any simpler numbers that might help to drive personal and team performance goals.  So here are my back-of-an-envelope metrics for “good cricket” – by which I mean “winning cricket”.

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The chimp paradox…can you ride tandem?

One of the books on my reading list after the ECB CA Conference 2013 was Dr Steve Peters‘ “The Chimp Paradox“.

This came with ringing endorsements from exceptional athletes – Dr Peters is cited as “…the most important person in my career…” by one multiple-Gold medal winner – and I can see why.

Sometimes, an athlete can be his or her own worst enemy.  What start as little doubts or upsets can easily develop into major issues.  Dr Peters identifies the “inner chimp” as the source of (some of) the problems, and describes techniques for managing the chimp’s behaviour.

And yet…if that chimp really is five times stronger than “me”, and five times quicker, surely it would be better to co-opt him to pedal the bike? Rather than exercising and boxing our chimps, perhaps we could try working together?

Can you ride tandem?