Someblokecalleddaves January wrist spin diary

The month starts with very mild weather here in the UK and the grass in the paddock where I practice across the road is actually growing! The temperature during the day has been well in excess of 10 degrees centigrade for the last 2 weeks over the Christmas holiday.

Early Jan made a decent start to the exercise regime and my diet's improved now that all the Christmas food's been eaten or thrown away. The main weakness still seems to be my lower back, but with the little bit of exercise that I did do towards the end of Dec I've now been able to do the head-stands again for well in excess of 2 minutes. Current record still stands at 4 minutes and 10 seconds.

Mid January and the back soreness still prevailed and was starting to worry me, so I upped the exercise regime and focused on my Glutes and core strength. There's a lot of commentary on the internet relating to the fact that if you do a job where you're relatively inactive - sitting at a computer, you lose the muscles in your butt. If that happens, then all of the surrounding connected muscles and joints start to suffer leading to problems with the hips, back and knees. So, core strength and butt muscles it is for me at the moment.

End of January whilst doing a headstand (Good for core strength and balance) I over-balanced and where my fingers are locked together behind my head, my head rolled over the fingers and completely mangled them. That's put a stop to the exercise, it also coincided with the weather taking a turn for the worse so any activities like cycling would have been been thwarted anyway. I reckon it'll be early February before I start again.

Blogs and stuff

I've also started to delete some of my blogs and consolidate them as I'm trying to generate traffic to this one, but it seems pretty difficult and slow at the moment. The other blog with the first series of pitch maps here is still getting loads of hits, but ideally I'll delete these, because I want the traffic coming to the new pitch map and plans blog (See link in the top-right side bar) here, or click on the page image below...
Over the weekend of Jan 6th I discovered that the blogs weren't showing adverts because I had an ad-blocking extension set up and it looked as though I needed to re-set the adverts. So I'm going through all my blogs at the moment checking to see that they've all got adverts on, but I'm only too aware people use ad' blocking software, which is a shame.

Here are some of the other activities that I've been up to.

The batsman's analysis blog has some examples in albeit from the old league (SNEL). I've included these just to see how it looks and establish a way of producing the diagrams that'll be consistent and coherent. Previous manifestations have been very popular with tens of thousands of hits, but they've taken shed-loads of time to produce because of the heavy use of Photoshop. The new approach will hopefully mean I can up-load the wagon wheel diagrams and plans the same weekend as the games.

Click on the image to go to the website.

The other deals with another aspect of strategy and the formulation of a bowling plan and includes a link to a Youtube video you can pretty much guarantee will be deleted because SKY will hunt the up-loader down and threaten to destroy him if he doesn't delete it and then people wonder why crickets decreasing in popularity eh?

That link is here http://wristspinbowling.blogspot.com/2017/10/1-best-of-wrist-spin-bowling-2.html

My other active blogs include…

https://bowlingplans.blogspot.com/

http://theoldwristspinner.blogspot.com/

http://wristspinbowling.blogspot.com/

This is an example of some of the bowling vids on my Youtube channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBodRls5i80&t=21s

The hits on this blog are steadily growing and the nice thing is I'm getting really positive feedback from different people from all around the world. The original post on the other website where all the batsmen were in one post is gradually being reduced as I transfer them to the blog above.

The club had its AGM on Jan 25th and that was attended by a much bigger crowd than usual. We're almost certainly going to be fielding 3 teams in the new T-Rippon league, but there's an option to field 4 if there's a sudden surge in players as the season starts it seems. There's a real feel of optimism around the club after 2 years of misery caused by the loss of so many key players over one winter. The word is some players who have left over the last 3 or 4 years are looking to come back and play some games on and off and there seems to be a few new blokes. The new blokes also reckon they've got mates that'll play the occasional game as well.

We've lost some key players as well because of the change in game format, but the fact that we're initially fielding 3 teams rather than four offsets that.

We'll find out what division we'll be playing in by mid February and early Feb we'll be getting into the nets. In recent years nets have been a bit sparse with regards attendance, so it'll be interesting to see who turns up? With regards nets Joe and I haven't been to Writtle at all this year other than the one session. This is primarily due to the fact that whenever I ask him if he wants to go he's never up for it.

Other than, that not a lot happened over January.

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.