Cricket making notes - post match

Over the years reading the odd book here and there I've heard accounts about Wrist-Spinners that make detailed notes about the batsmen that they have to face. Clarrie Grimmett being one of them as I recall.

These days I guess the statisticians do a lot of that for them and you hear stories about bowlers and coaches reviewing footage of batsmen prior to and after games. Unless you've got a very committed Mum/Dad or friend who know their way around a digital camera, this isn't going to be possible to this extent. But over the last couple of days I've heard about some good 'Old school' practice that is conducted by some fairly surprising bowlers.

Today is the 2nd day of the 2nd test - England v Virat Kholi's India at Lords and it's the 2nd day where it's rained all day so far, although this morning about 20 minutes were played and 3 of India's wickets fell. So, with no play yesterday, BBC Radio 5 Live test match special did a series of interviews with players and ex-players with a focus on Spin Bowling. One of the things that came out of this was Ravi Ashwin mentioning that every time he plays, as soon as he can - after the game he makes detailed notes with regards what the batsmen did - their strengths and weaknesses etc. He said as this helps him make critical adjustments to his approach to the individual batsmen - increasing his chance of winning the battle.

In the same studio Graeme Swanne and Michael Atherton (who bowled a bit of Wrist-Spin in his time), both reiterated how important this is as part of your Reflective Practice and development as an effective bowler.

We even as club players can do the same.

1. You need to be watching the game and the batsmen even before you bowl - maybe talk to your captain and or talk to more experienced players around you and get their opinions quickly between overs and definitely at the end of the game or during drinks breaks... "What do you reckon his strongest shot is"? or "Where do you reckon he's most vulnerable"? Those kind of questions. The more you play the more you'll start to recognise such things and be able to put strategies into place.

2. Bowl your spell to your plan - based on what you've observed before bowling and make a mental note of what happens during your spell.

3. As soon as you've finished - write your notes and draw diagrams by way of explanation.

4. Maybe even consider approaching the batsmen and talk to them about your bowling and their batting, make sure you flatter them to some extent to bring them 'On-side' so you can extract any good nuggets of feed-back that might be useful or even a compliment or two! I find at my level they're happy to talk to you as a Wrist-Spinner because they rarely see it in games and it provides a good test and battle for them. Make notes on what they say if it's useful.

5. Finally make a note of their name or - if you're as mad and obsessive as me take a photograph of them to keep with your notes, to help you remember next time you come up against the bloke.

Next time you play that team dig your notes and in the meantime you'd have come up with a plan. Keep your fingers crossed that it's you that bowls to him - beg the captain for a chance to bowl at him and put your plan into practice.

Obviously, me being me I take it a whole step further, the notes are converted into digital versions and I share the whole thing with the rest of the world - see here...

https://battinganalysis.blogspot.com/

and here...

http://wristspinbowling.blogspot.com/2017/10/batsmen-of-sedcb-region-and-how-to-get.html

It's rained at last!

It's been hot and dry here in the UK and it's been pretty much the same elsewhere in the Northern hemisphere. The result is the wickets are dry and hard.

Nearer to home the Paddock where Joe and I practice and have a knock about has suffered from the long dry spell with massive cracks on the wicket. Thankfully at the end you bowl to and bat on, it hasn't been anywhere near as bad as the areas mid-way down the wicket. We've had to resort to bowling really full and do some running repairs on the area "good" to "full", but this rain today has meant that I've been able to do something more significant.

In the garage I have a load of clay ready to be mixed with organic matter (Compost). The clay is graded through the use of a couple of Sieve's with the intention of re-seeding or repairing.

 
This image here below is indicative of how bad the cracks have been. What's surprised me this summer elsewhere, is how sound the cricket wickets have been that I've seen, none of them have cracked in the same way which is either down to the correct ratios of clay with organic matter and care and attention from the local council?

So today with it scheduled to rain all day I've put down some of the slightly rougher and bigger mix with some seed in. I don't think the seed will take as it'll dry out again and we'll probably use it through till September for batting. What I'm hoping will happen, is the rain will break down the earth further still and it'll bind/stick to the existing earth 

 Over-night the rain is due to stop and tomorrow cloudy/bright with a good breeze, so before it has the chance to dry out I'll roll it and with a bit of luck it'll bind with existing surface. There was a little bit of a dip in the surface - a bit of a bowl, so hopefully I'll have rectified that to some extent.

Another blog!

One of my posts on what I consider to be my main blog these days has gone mental with regards to how many hits it receives just recently. The blog was only started a year or so ago when I realised that I wasn't going to stick with my website and decided that I needed a blog more in the format of the website.

The website was an experiment which I always felt might fail because it was going to cost money and in the meantime while it was up I couldn't figure out how to monetize it in order at least to cover my costs. So at the end of the 2 year period I scrapped it in favour of the new blog here...

http://wristspinbowling.blogspot.com/

For the most part it's still an on-going project where I'm trying to collate all the best bits of my old blog which has the weird and not obvious name of www.mpafirsteleven.blogspot.co.uk

The new blog though had a feature which I started on the website... articles about the batsmen I face with plans and diagrams for field settings. This individual post on its own is massively successful...

Probably one of the most successful post ever and I can't be sure why? What I do know is that it's endorsed by Stuart MacGill because he +'s it on Google which is massively helpful and very much appreciated. But I think more than that it's the images of the field settings and the plans.

But this month I've realised that I need to update these batsmen each time I meet them in the games and add more data and I really that to do this in just one post is going to make the individual post too big and cumbersome to navigate especially if are from my region and you use it. So a separate blog has been started today dedicated to this aspect of wrist-spinning with each of the batsmen with their dedicated pages that can be updated year on year. 

That can be found here. 

Hopefully people will be able to negotiate the batsman via the side-bar facility.

Cancelled Cricket games

No-one likes to see a cricket game cancelled because of the lack of players, but it happens and seemingly more frequently these days in the area where I live. I was looking forward to the game this weekend in the 3rd XI and then the night before the other team Orsett and Thurrock contacted the club to say they couldn't get a team together.

Instead of moping around and being disappointed I said to myself -  If this weekend is anything like most of the weekends this year and last for the team I play in, somewhere out there at 12.30 there's going to be a game starting with one of the teams short of at least 1 bloke, if not 2 or 3! 

When you play in games like that the lack of that 1 player has a significant impact on the game, to the point that it must leave players thinking - Why do I do this every weekend losing game after game? It may also lead to people giving the game up or people looking at their clubs team-sheets and thinking -  so and so isn't playing I'm not going to bother either and so there's a domino effect.

So if we assume that our team had all 11 players ready for a game Orsett and Thurrock may have had 6 or 7 blokes also ready too. Surely if those people really want to play like me, they could potentially do a bit of searching and find a team at short notice that they could make up the numbers for? There's so many games being played at the weekend with a player missing, potentially all of those blokes could have been accommodated?

I went over to my nearest ground... The Rec where Grays CC were playing Bow Green CC (From London) and found a team of West Indians (The Bow Green boys) already there at 11.45 and asked if they had a full team. They said they were fairly certain that they'd be a man short and said, come back at 12.30 ready to play and I reckon you'll get a game. I went home got my gear ready and drove back over at 12.30 and sure enough I was in. I reckon any team will be more than happy to have an extra player if they're short.

If these lads hadn't been short I could have driven to numerous grounds in the area and probably would have found a game in that hour between 11.30 and 12.30. I reckon you'd be guaranteed a game if you were prepared to drive a few miles for instance to Fairlop Waters and walk around these pitches below...

Everywhere I look I find articles about how much of a state cricket is in because of falling numbers. Maybe it's time for the administrators within cricket at District level to come up with some kind of a hotline or website that can match players with teams that are short when there's either (a). A match cancelled as in the case of my scenario this last weekend or (b). Your clubs got so many players that they fill the team every weekend and blokes get left out on a regular basis.

Surely if you want to play cricket there's a game somewhere you can slot into?

To the game...

Bow Green won the toss and decided to bat much to the dismay of some of their players. The Captain Bernard asked me where I normally batted and I said 10 or 11. There was some discussion with some of the other senior players and I was put in at No.5.

Wickets fell quickly at the start with Grays CC pace attack, but Bow Green were initially scoring at 5 an over. I found myself in quite quickly with a young bloke Rayon Younge he was pretty good. I did okay with the pace attack, but then they brought in the Spin bowlers and I was all at sea. I managed to fend off the leg-spinner, but a 2nd spinner who appeared to be bowling finger spin suddenly began turning the ball both ways. Grays set a very obvious trap that I fell for - a field with virtually no-one on the leg-side and I changed from playing with a straight bat to trying to swing across the line to strike the ball down the slope on the leg-side at The Rec. I was out straight away. Bow Green posted a total of 140.

Bernard even gave me a few overs that were quite expensive, but I bought them a wicket. Bernard cam on and took two crucial wickets at the very end of the game and almost got them home, but Grays got the winning runs with 2 wickets to spare.

It was hot and sunny and a lovely day for a game of cricket, so I was so glad to have been able to play and it was a very different game to ours. Bow Green are a very vocal team with a lot of differing opinions among the senior players!

What was good to see though was the fact that where Grays and Chadwell CC seemingly fizzled out for some reason having become Thurrock CC and then eventually merging with Orsett to become Orsett and Thurrock; Into that void has come Grays CC primarily made up of Asian players of probably Pakistan family origins. So within just a few years where seemingly a club associated with a town and area has disappeared, a whole new club has emerged which is brilliant to see especially when you hear so much bad news around cricket and its future.

Weirdly I'd just watched this video the day or so before (Click on image).

the essence of which is the fact that crickets future lies to some extent in the hands of South Asian players. The other point in this video is the demise of West Indian cricket clubs, so it was good to see a club that in this instance that was primarily West Indian players. I had a chat with some of them at the end and asked about whether they had young players coming through and unfortunately it was pretty much the same story at that depicted in the video above. 

At the end of the day I exchanged numbers with Bernard and said that if in the future I was scratching around for a game I'd give him a call and see if he was short.