First roll of the season in the Paddock

Here in Jacob Rees Moggs Little England the Weather continues to be pretty rubbish with a forecast of potentially more snow. But in the lull today after a couple of dry-ish days, with the threat that the ground might soon dry out too much, I went over to the paddock and did some work. In the last post I'd raked the moss off and in the meantime the weather hasn't been conducive for any kind of recovery of the grass, so it looked pretty muddy and rough. The priority though for us is just to get it pretty flat for the most part and then in the next couple of weeks top dress it and plant new seed. The other thing I wanted to do was fill in the tread holes at the bowlers end ready to be rolled and seeded.

Here's the situation at the start of the work...

From the other end...

Over the years we've cut a full strip in the paddock prior to the council taking down the perimeter fences, but the last couple of years we've just worked on one end so that we can bowl and bat. You can see in the middle there are marks where people get in the space and do doughnuts on motorbikes, thankfully this is a rare occurrence. In fact more damage is done if the council cut the grass when it's too wet using their sit on type tractor 'Flymo' lawnmower.

Today, I marked out where the stumps will be set and then rolled the surface either side of an imaginary line between the stumps with more space on the off-side. 

Above the foot-marks filled.


The playing area after the rolling, it's never going to be Lords, but it'll do us for a bit of practice just outside our backdoor.

 View from the side.

Looking at the weather forecast, it's predicted to get down to -3 or 4 degrees by this coming Tuesday and Wednesday with the chance of some snow. Once that's gone, I'm going to have to assume that as we're nearly into April I can get some top-dressing on it - a mixture of clay and compost. Try and get the surface more even and then seed and feed it and leave it to see how it goes. You can bet we'll then have bloody heatwave and no rain or the council will drive all over with their mower and tear it all up!

The Paddock 2nd of March 2018

It was supposed to be the first day of spring yesterday and I may have had a wander over to the paddock to have a look at what I should do by way of getting ready for the summer. Instead I was over there taking pictures of the snow.

It's around this time of year I start to think about whether I'll be bothered to make use of the space. If you don't know the background story here, I'll go over it quickly.

This is a piece of un-designated land about 70 metres from my house. There's nothing there except for a patch of rough grass. There used to be a chain link fence and two goal posts, but they were all removed about 2 years ago and the 'Anti traveler' fence was erected to keep them from parking their caravans on the site I'm guessing. Thankfully, the cowboys that were contracted to remove all the fencing didn't do all of it so there was some fencing left behind albeit covered in brambles, bushes and Ivy. As well as not taking all of the fencing down, they didn't take all of the wire, posts and concrete bases away either - instead they dragged them into the woods and dumped them in there.

The local council do very little with the space by way of maintaining it - they mow it about 5-6 times a year and keep the grass relatively short. I've contacted the council in the past and asked them to replace the fence when it was still there albeit with sections missing or vandalised. They came along and had a look and deemed it wasn't worth it saying that it wasn't a designated space for recreation. That aside, people have played football in there since the 1970's as well as other games and when my kids were small we started to use it to play cricket in and practice in and still do - helped by the fact that some of the fencing - about 65% of it was intact so that we were able to play without the ball disappearing into the woods. Why the fencing was taken down - still alludes me and almost feels like an attempt to stop kids from using the space?

So for the last 8 years or so I and my sons have cut and rolled a wicket in the space and utilised it, going so far as putting nets up

Click on the image to see the video.

In the image/video above you can see the fence on the off-side and there's a good piece of fence directly behind where I'm shooting the video from, both these sections were removed and dumped in the woods by the contractors.

We now have to put the blue scaffold fencing stuff up any time we want to bat. Thankfully the contractors left behind some sections of fence and we're able to at least bowl in the space up against the fence. This wicket you can see here was also ruined by the contractors they parked their transit on the wicket area in October when the grass was wet and left enormous indents on a length for fast bowlers - Joe the kid batting is now a fast bowler and is 16.

Back to this season 2018...

The other thing the council don't do and I'm not sure if they've ever done it is - prune the bushes back. I noticed a few years back when the bushes hung low enough, the bloke on the mower drove around the bushes and therefore left the perimeter grass uncut and over a period of a couple of summers the grass area was noticeably being reduced by virtue of the trees being left to grow into the space. Just down the road there was a similar open space that wasn't fenced off but was still mowed and over the last 8 years the grass has given way to bushes and now there's almost no grass at all - but a hand full of bushes and this I reckon is what would happen to this space if no-one maintained it.

So in the Autumn and spring I maintain it, cutting the brambles and bushes back to stop them encroaching on the space and cutting the light out so that the grass doesn't grow and the bushes and weeds take over. Each year I ponder whether to continue and so far I have done as it's one of the things I still do with Joe and it's also one of the ways I keep fit and it makes me feel a bit like Clarrie Grimmet who bowled in his back yard into his 80's every day that he could. (he obviously liked his cricket) 

So, this year will I be doing it again? Yeah I reckon so, last year we used it quite a bit for batting and it got very worn. I'm even contemplating trying to get this wicket you see here back in action, so once the snow has gone and while the ground is still soaking wet we'll get over there with the roller and see if we can flatten out the areas we'll be bowling into.

It make no sense to me

I don't know about you, but as a kid and even now when I do something I like, I want to do it a lot. If I go on holiday, I want to be there for at least two weeks. The idea that someone might suggest - You know what, you should consider just going for 3 days, it'd be so much better. Strikes me as being daft.

As a kid at scouts, the scout leaders might have taken us to the local woods and said... "Okay lads, the last few weeks we've been coming over here and playing run-outs for an hour and half, from now on we're going to make it so much better we're going to play run-outs for 15 mins and then go back to the scout hut. Does that make sense?

What about changing the format of football to make it better? Let's play it so that as soon as there's a goal, the games finished - first goal wins with a maximum of 15 minutes, that would be so much better wouldn't it? Can you see where I'm going with this?

It baffles me that if you like something you'd do less of it. I love cricket, for me 50 overs games at the weekend is fine, 60 would be an improvement, any more than that would probably be limited to the very middle of summer for a few weeks? But hey more cricket, even just for those 2 weeks either side of mid-summer - I'm up for it! 70 overs anyone?

But the idea that it needs to be reduced to encourage kids to play is bizarre. Do you think that kids would agree with a proposal to have their time spent on mobile phones and XBOX games reduced to improve the experience would go down well with them?

Do you know what - instead of playing PUBG for next 8 hours, just play it for half an hour - you'll be so much better at it.

Or - Get off your phone, your life will be so much better for it. What kid is going to buy into that, or most adults for that matter! If you like it, you're going to want to do more of it, in the same way that I believe the more I play cricket the better I'll be at it. I'm sure there are many a cricket expert who will agree to that same principle providing it is done in a way that is productive and beneficial. People say things like "You need more time at the crease in order that your batting improves". Everything seems to point towards the fact that if you enjoy something - football, run-outs, holidays, gawping at your phone living your life vicariously through others experiences, on-line games like PUBG, the more you do, the better you'll be. So the idea that by doing less of it - that's somehow preferable and more attractive?

I surf, and when I was younger I was likely to give it a go most times of the year. March was the worst - south coast UK in march the water bitterly cold with a biting northerly wind - wholly unpleasant, but the intention was to be in the water as long as you could and catch as many waves as possible till the point you became so cold it was physically impossible to do so any longer. At no point did I think the whole thing could be enhanced by being shorter - it completely negates the point of surfing - the more you do in all sorts of conditions, the better you'll be. The key thing here you have to understand is I liked  surfing (Still do), so no matter what the weather or the conditions threw at me, it wouldn't stop me, because it was something I wanted to do. So how the hell does the argument in cricket at the moment - that the shorter a cricket match is, the likely it is going to attract kids and keep people playing the game? The only conclusion you can draw is they just don't like cricket that much. 

Pre-season

Our pre-season nets has been announced at last, disappointing though as there's only going to be four sessions, but it is at a venue that is 20 or so miles away, so I expect that take up of the opportunity will be relatively low - hence only 4 sessions have been booked. Not sure how many people will turn up though as we're having a bit of weather at the moment...

This is the paddock where me and Joe practice in the summer.

The snow's about 4" deep (10cm) and the country seems to have ground to a halt which is mental. I've not been to work now for 2 days and was sent home at midday on the first day of the snow. Makes you wonder what would happen if we had a repeat of the kind weather we saw back in 1987. It snowed off and on over two weeks, there was one day or night where it snowed seriously for a prolonged period and it ended up about a foot or so deep, the most snow I've ever seen. The snow then stayed because the temperature was held pretty low at sub-zero temperatures during the day and at night it was frequently -10 to -18 degrees. See here You'll have seen that 1963 was pretty cold as well, that year it snowed on Christmas Eve and snow then laid on the ground till march with the average temp over that period being 0.5 centigrade. So what all the fuss at the moment is about I don't know? I'm guessing it's the fear of being sued if someone falls over? 

Needless to say Joe and I will make a big effort to get there as it's £5.00 for a couple of hours. I can't wait having been cooped up indoors for the best part of 4 months now. 

I need to go with a bit of a plan though. Batting - I'm going to try and be a little more positive with the batting - look to score runs more rather than defend all the time.

Bowling... I'm looking to develop a couple of straight balls having watched a fair bit of Adil Rashid and seen how successful he is with them...

I like the fact that Sky have called these deliveries "Straight balls" and none of those daft names given to these ambiguous deliveries that many Wrist-Spinners bowl. I'll be working with a top-spinner and another which is more like a poorly executed off-break delivery and because this it what it basically is, it has a tendency to either (a) not spin at all and just go on straight - quite a bit faster than my leg-breaks. Or (b) I get something on it and it comes in a little to the RH batsman - again still slightly faster and flatter than my leg-breaks.

The other thing I want to work on is getting my arm lower for the leg-breaks as that helps with dip and drift. 

If we get there I might post something up after Sunday.