Cricket coaching, fitness and tips - Tactics

Not Getting Your Say in Your Cricket Team? Take a Tip from Pilots

David Hinchliffe — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 06:37:00 +0000

It’s frustrating to have your thoughts and ideas go unnoticed.

You have a brilliant tactic the captain won’t consider. You watch in disgust as the pitch preparations are poor while noone will listen to you solution. The coach forces you to train in ways that don’t work for you.

Whatever it is, you don’t know how to get out of the spiral of being ignored. It makes you feel angry and powerless.

If only these people listened!

You’re not alone.

In fact, it’s a problem faced in a world with a more deadly possible outcome: commercial airlines. If a plane crashes, people die. It’s vital that everyone in the cockpit has a say in preventing accidents, even when there is clearly one person (the pilot) in charge.

After one accident it was determined that the pilot was ignoring the advice of a co-pilot. The airlines worked out that there is a simple way of changing this. This is called PACE

Get heard with PACE

PACE is a way of gradually raising the level of feedback to a superior without causing issues. Here is the process:

Probe. Make your concerns know as a general observation. “Looks like the opening bowler has lost a bit of accuracy, what do you think captain?”
Alert. If probing is not getting the desired effect, step it up by outright suggesting something. You’re still being discreet and respectful at this point. “Do you think it would work if we lowered the blades on the mower to make the outfield grass shorter?”
Challenge. At this stage, you are going to get more direct. It’s time to stop suggesting and engage the issue directly. “You keep getting out LBW no matter how hard you work in nets. Do you object to a 4 angles net session to correct the issue?”
Emergency. In a plane, you would only go to this level if you feel life is in danger. That’s never going to be the case in cricket, but if you know for sure your solution will prevent a major failure in some way, take emergency steps and speak plainly about the solution. “If we keep trying to get this set bastman out he will win the game for them. Let’s focus on giving him a single and dismissing the weaker players at the other end.”

Does PACE work?

PACE works in planes and in medical settings like operations. There is no reason it can’t work for your cricket too.

But it’s not easy.

Plain speaking people have trouble with probing and alerting because they feel they should speak the truth immediately.

Diplomatic people feel they are challenging authority too much when using challenge and emergency.

However, trust the process and try each step in order. Even if it might feel uncomfortable at first. You’ll be suprised how often it can bring your point to the fore. Better a moment of discomfort than an obvious issue being ignored, right?

Do you speak up? How do you manage these difficult moments?

The Art of the Target: How to Target Bowlers to Improve Your Scoring Rate

David Hinchliffe — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 07:43:00 +0000

Can club and school cricketers use the fashionable tactic of targeting certain bowlers?

It’s possible.

The idea is simple: You know you are coming up against a side with a mixture of quality of bowling. So, you decide to take fewer risks against the good ones and make up the difference by attacking against weaker bowling.

If the plan works, you end up with a bigger total than if you play every bowler on their merits.

It’s also great in limited over games where there are restrictions on the bowlers. You can force a weaker bowler out of the attack, meaning the better bowler has to bowl out sooner and you have more overs against part-time bowlers.

Here’s how you do it

Choose a target

Your first consideration is to decide who to go after.

If you play regularly against the opposition you will know who this is before the game. In fact, you can prepare early in training sessions up to the run up to the game with the target in mind.

There are no rules about who you target because it could be anyone in the right circumstance. Here are some types of bowler I have seen targeted well:

The accurate but relatively slow medium pace bowler.
Any bowler who is not getting the ball to do much (spinners on a flat pitch for example).
Quick but wild fast bowlers.
Part-time bowlers.
Any bowler with a short boundary in your hitting area.

As you can see, your target does not have to be a bad bowler. They may be very good, but conditions are against them and in your favour.

You can agree the target beforehand or - if you are feeling confident - even decide to take someone on during the game when you realise they have a chink in the armour.

Attacking the bowler

When you have decided to go after someone, stay calm. It’s easy to get carried away and start swinging. This is not mindful batting.

Instead, mentally switch your gear up.

Go from “just batting” to “controlling the game”. Instead of waiting for the bad ball, think about where you can create a boundary.

If you have prepared well, you know your scoring areas. You know the shots that get you to score more quickly and you are confident you can take a bigger risk than normal because it will likely pay off.

One excellent example of this I saw in a club game was a friendly match where a club professional opened the batting against a keen but inexperienced medium pace swing bowler. The overseas batsman defended the first ball of the match and saw it was a gentle pace with a little away swing. He decided he could easily play this type of bowling and promptly hit the second ball of the match over mid off for a giant six.

The formula was there: weaker bowling combined with batsman confident in his scoring areas. The batsman had not changed his game, but had calculated he was good enough to risk it.

Be flexible

This method takes a combination of good technique and tactical nous. Sometimes you will get it wrong, so be ready to be flexible.

Imagine you are the batsman above. Imagine you decide to play the same shot and you are as confident at is as he is. Now imagine you attempt it and edge it down to third man.

You might decide to take that clue. The bowler could be better than you think. You need to get your eye in more. You might think that shot is not as easy as you thought. You drop down a gear and decide to wait for the bad ball a bit longer instead. There is no harm in that.

The point is, like all batting, you need to constantly assess your approach based on bowler, conditions and how “in” you feel. It’s more than simply deciding the bowler is rubbish and trying to smash it without a plan.

Prepare to attack

Using PitchVision at nets will help you with this. You can find out what kind of bowler you are able to attack with a high degree of success, and what kind of balls give you more trouble.

Once you know this, you can practice to make yourself more confidence in your best shots and hide your weaker areas.

Call to get more details here.

The Total Guide to Preparing for Different Pitch Conditions

David Hinchliffe — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 02:10:00 +0000

Do you worry that batting indoors will ruin your outdoor form? Have you got a game coming up on a different type of wicket from your home pitch?

This is the guide for you.

With a little careful preparation over a couple of sessions (and a warm up), you can get your feet, hands and bat ready for excellent timing from the off.

Here’s what you do.

Practice drills

In an ideal world, you will practice in the exact conditions you are going to face in your big game. This is not an ideal world.

Even if the wicket and weather are identical, you won’t face the same bowlers. You won’t have the same level of energy and you won’t feel the same amount of pressure. So what can you do?

Make it up as much as possible with some drills.

For example, preseason for my club is mostly constrained to indoor practice on fast, bouncy concrete. Yet, matches are played on soft, low wickets where the ball swings and seams laterally. It’s far from ideal and upsets timing.

We use the the following drills to balance things out:

Then, in normal nets we encourage bowlers to bowl fuller with outdoor lengths (tracked on PitchVision) and batsmen to try and get forward to everything.

This is helped by placing two mats in one indoor lane to slow the bounce.

However, it’s still easy for bowlers to bang it in short, so we use the instant feedback from PitchVision to show when this happens. This naturally pushing bowlers forward, knowing they will probably get driven but happy they are hitting the right length for outdoors.

And you know what that means?

More realistic practice for the batters!

If you do this kind of practice for a few weeks before the start of the season, you find you are better prepared for the change.

Game plans

So you have done some practice. Maybe it’s not perfect but it’s something. Match day has arrived.

What next?

Before the game, make sure you do a few simple throwdown drills to get yourself in the right positions. For slow, low, wet pitches you can use the no feet and one leg drills above. But whatever the pitch, pick the drills that work for you to get yourself moving.

Then decide your tactical approach.

I usually advise a confident and watchful approach for a few balls. It will take you a while to feel well set, even if your preparation has been perfect. So, take your time. Look to play the lowest risk options at first.

In our example of moving from indoors to outdoors, you will be surprised how many bad balls you get. Bowlers also have early season cobwebs. They tend to bowl too short after a long winter indoors and you can take advantage:

Back foot driving slow, low back of a length
Front foot driving half volley length
Pulling long hops.

With confidence and a touch of luck you can easily score at a decent lick by playing the way coaches have advised for decades.

The main difference is these days, coaches ask top order batters to thrive under these conditions rather than simply survive. You might ask if there is a difference. If you know how important mindset is to your game plan, then you know the difference is huge.

But let’s imagine your mindset is good. Nevertheless you find you are bogged down and not getting the ball away. It might be good bowling or that you are still not timing it well.

Stay calm.

You can go up a gear with simple tricks like this. You are still playing safe, just looking to take control a little more. So, you slightly increase the risk in order to get your engine revving.

Summary

It’s very difficult to prepare perfectly for different conditions.
Start with simple drills to get your technique in line with conditions.
Make sure you have a few practice sessions in conditions as close as possible.
Adjust your game plan to give you the best chance of success.
Go into the game with a confidence and positive mindset, born of good practice and a good game plan.

How "Team Targets" Improve Your Cricket (and Your Team Mates Too)

David Hinchliffe — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 06:10:00 +0000

We all know how important setting targets is to cricket success, but most of us focus on individual aims and forget that teams can set targets too.

Setting 'team targets' is just as powerful in motivating players to do well because - like individual goal setting - a realistic and achievable target focuses the mind.

Cricket has teams within teams (batsmen get the runs, bowlers take the wickets, fielders help the bowlers) and working with your sub-team colleagues works better when you all have the same goal.

So what are team targets?

Batting

The easiest batting target is the score the opposition has set. Everyone can easily see how many you need to cross the line.

But even with this, you can break it down to something a bit more realistic.

Set the openers a target for the first 5 overs, and keep batting partners setting 5-10 over targets through the innings to keep the overall target in sight.

If you are batting first you can also set a "top 6 target". That is to say, the number of runs you want the batsmen in your team to score. This can help focus the mind and prevent the common assumption that "someone else will get the runs".

However, total targets can go horribly wrong. So be careful.

We call it "scoreboard pressure". If you feel you are behind the rate and don't know how to catch up you panic. So, it's helpful to go over some old scores and see how your team does. You can look at batting averages and likeliness of scoring a 50 or taking 5 wickets of individual players to build a picture of what might happen with any given team.

If you want to get super granular, you can break it down to game phases even more. How does the reliable slow-scoring opening pair getting 20 in the first 12 overs influence the overall total compared to going out with pinch hitters who leave you on 60-3 in the same time frame?

You can do the same for singles and boundaries sored.

Ask yourself how these elements influence the results of your games. If you see a trend, target that area in as small and reachable steps as you can manage, and let the result look after itself.

However much you analyse, go to the game with some easy targets like "100 in the first 30". Leave scope for variations like the opposition bringing in a star bowler, an bad pitch or your best batsman getting injured in the warm up. Reset where needed and get on with it.

Bowling and fielding

One of my favourite rules of thumb in the 50 over matches I play is at the 30 over mark.

I know that usually, if the opposition need about 80 runs it's going to be a close finish. If we need 4 wickets we should bowl them out. So my target is to manipulate the opposition to be 6 down at the 30 over mark.

On a more short term basis, you can use team maidens. Here your bowlers attempt to bowl 12 dot balls in a row to put a lid on a scoring rate. Most club batsmen can't go more than a few balls without hitting out and making a mistake.

Fielders can support this by aiming to keep a "clean sheet" during the team maiden and preventing quick singles from releasing the pressure.

The key with team targets is to remember that within the bigger game, there are many smaller games going, and goals help you keep track of what is really happening much more closely than just looking at the overall runs and wickets column.

image credit: SarahCanterbury

Bowling Tactics: How to "Bowl Dry"

David Hinchliffe — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 05:44:00 +0000

Frustration: An underrated way to get wickets, and enormously effective at any level. In recent years, this has been called “squeezing” or “bowling dry”.

How do you bowl dry this way?

The key is simplicity. You bowl outside off stump and set a strong off side field. This prevents batsmen from scoring, increases frustration and forces an error.

But as with all simple plans, it’s difficult to put into action. Here’s how to avoid the problems and make the plan a success.

When to use dry bowling

In all forms of cricket, one of the best tactics is to bowl at the top of off stump and hope for some lateral movement off the pitch or in the air. It’s time tested. It works.

Bowling dry is a flexible alternative.

It might be that you are up against strong batting who are playing your “top of off” plan well. You want to change it up.

A few years back, England used it in Test cricket in Australia more actively. They knew the ball would do little after the initial shine went off. The plan was to change line as soon as the ball stopped swinging, regardless of what the score looked like.

This approach is similarly useful in the middle overs of limited over games. The batsman are more aggressive than Test cricket but are forced to only use half the outfield to score.

In fact, it can also be used to slow down the start of a limited over innings or at the death, to manage where the ball is going.

How to bowl dry

There are two aspects to the tactic: areas to hit, and field placings.

The line and length has to be good because straying is costly. Straight balls have little defence and can be hit into large gaps. So, for seamers, aim the ball:

pitching 5–7m from the stumps (good length for most)
passing the stumps outside the line off off stump (between OO1 and OO3)

Your margin of error is bigger on length, as you can over or under pitch and get away with the ball struck hard into a well defended off side. However, if you stray your line onto the stumps you open up the undefended on side. Despite this, it’s no more difficult to bowl dry than to hit the top of off; it requires precision either way.

The field is all about packing the off side.

Most balls will be hit into the off side, so you need to defend it strongly. Clearly the game situation will define exact placings, but the general rule is six or seven on the “posh side”.

Here’s a sample field for a seamer in the middle overs of a 50 over game:

In this case, three boundary runners back up a ring field in the covers. Three leg side fielders offer some protection for errors. Equally, if you are attacking you can have three slips and a gully with no one on the rope. The options are varied but the first principle is to defend the off side.

Some argue seven is better on the off side. I think this encourages bowling too wide and leave almost no margin for error. It changes the tactic from a squeeze to pure negativity. So, be cautious. If you have a bowler capable of it and you are searching for a way to change tactics it may work, but only as a last resort.

How will you know it’s worth pursuing?

The ultimate test of the tactic is wickets. If they are falling you are winning. That said, if the ball being struck well into the off side for little value, you can also see the batsman get frustrated. That’s a more subtle sign you should keep at it.

Eventually you see the batman trying to work the ball into the leg side. They may even succeed with some unusual shots. However, you are forcing this and eventually a mistake will come. Stay patient and stick with it as long as it’s feeling right.

Summary

Bowling dry is a viable tactic at club and school level.
It requires similar skill levels to other tactics.
It works by patience and perseverance, bowling to a packed off side field and drying up run scoring.

Playing as a Unit: How to Use a Cricket Cliche to Improve your Cricket Team

David Hinchliffe — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 06:02:00 +0000

International players and coached these days are always going on about how they “performed as a unit” – fielded, batted, bowled.

Lurking in the depths of this moribund press talk is a grain of truth we can use at any level.

You see, whatever level you play, from first-class to under-11, we all have something in common.

We are all human beings.

And human beings all share the need to feel part of a group, to belong to something greater than their individual selves.

Even the most selfish people crave that feeling.

That’s where we can use the idea of a ‘unit’ to make us play the game as a team, rather than a group of individuals (which is always the danger in cricket where the focus is bowler vs. batsman).

Knowing your unit

If you don’t know what your job is, how are you supposed to know if you did it or not?

With that in mind, a ‘unit’ is just an extension of individual roles: It packages up a bunch of roles and puts them into a team within the team.

So the batsmen become a unit, with jobs to do and ways to do it. As do the bowlers and of course there is a fielding unit.

Players love this idea. If you are a bowler and that batsmen collapse, it’s up to you and your unit to clean up the mess. You still have that belonging without taking the blame.

But enough theory, let’s look at how to make these units work in practice.

The batting unit

Although there are different tactics and styles within the batting unit, the aim is to score runs.

So to be a unit, the top batsmen should assume the bowlers are not going to score any runs at all.

It’s all about taking responsibility as a group (and that group could be anything between 2 and 8 decent batsmen).

It’s in the nature of all of us to try less hard the bigger the group. Psychologists call it ‘social loafing’ – assuming someone else will make up the slack.

Having a clear batting unit with a clear run goal is a simple way to overcome this proven act of laziness.

Want an example?

Say you are batting first in a one day game. In the conditions you think on a good day your side is capable of 200 in your 40 overs. You have 5 top line batsmen in the side (lucky you if so, many club and school sides have just 1 really good batter and a few reasonable ones).

The top 5 have to take the responsibility for scoring every one of those runs. You could break it down any way you like:

Every player is looking to score 50-100 when they go out to bat
When someone fails, it’s up to whoever is left to take up the slack
Every player is looking to be there at the end. Be a ‘finisher’ from your first ball
Every pair considers the scoreboard to be ‘reset’ at zero when they come in and a partnership needs to be built from nothing

The bowling unit

We have all heard the line that bowlers hunt in pairs, or even packs. That’s the root of a good bowling unit.

A bowling unit is looking to either take wickets or keep the run rate down (or both). That’s done by applying pressure from both ends without letting up.

Of course there are different ways to do this. A combination of a wild strike bowler and a miserly medium pacer offer different challenges to the batsman but end up with the result you want even if the figures are 4-40 and 1-17 respectively.

To be a good unit you need 5 bowlers capable of doing to job of keeping the pressure on the batsman (through wickets or maidens). You might get away with 3-4, but any less will mean a gap that can only be made up by some exceptional bowling.

Bowling units also trust each other even when things go wrong. Anyone can have a bad game but a good unit doesn’t blame, it makes sure everyone else takes greater responsibility. You can read more about how to do it in this article.

The fielding unit

As an identity, fielders are the least likely to feel part of a unit.

Fielding is what you do when you are not performing your main skill (strike specialist wicket-keepers from that statement) and so we feel it’s a chore, a lonely one at that.

But when fielders do work together it’s an intimidating moment for batsmen who feel surrounded by 11 people all against them. And we all know how pressure makes wickets fall.

So make sure you are in a unit when you are fielding too:

Talk to fielders around you about the batsman and decide what fielding tactics would work best.
Keep encouraging the bowler and other fielders, especially when things are not going as planned. Remember it only takes one ball to take a wicket and change the game.
· Relax between balls and overs but keep talking to fielders around you to keep the overall feeling of a buzz about you.
Think of yourself as part of a team with the bowler, squeezing batsmen into mistakes.
Think of the wicket-keeper as the focus of the fielding unit. Get the ball to him or her frequently to keep up the impression of being the fielding leader. A good ‘keeper with a lively personality makes a huge difference to the atmosphere.

Overall, a unit is not something you need to think long and hard about with endless planning. It’s a loose knit group of people with a common goal (be it to score runs or take wickets).

If you think your team doesn’t have clear units, then it probably doesn’t. You need to work a little harder to get people thinking as one. It’s just a matter of introducing the idea of a unit and sitting back to let human nature take over.

And if you do that the overall team performance will improve too.

Powerplay: How to Score Quickly When the Field is Up

David Hinchliffe — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 10:20:20 +0000

Score fast in the powerplay.

From club and school cricket to the highest level, it can be tough to score against a field that’s up. This is especially true on poor batting wickets in T20 cricket.

Unless you have nailed your power game, you may ask yourself how you are going to get through that phalanx of fielders protecting the ring.

How are you supposed to rotate the strike?

How can you hit boundaries when there are fielders bearing down on all sides?

Of course the boundaries are relatively unprotected at this time. Perhaps you are batting in the first six overs of a Twenty20 match and only two are allowed out. With the right bowler to the wrong batsmen on a helpful pitch, you may even see no one out!

Game head on

The basic theory for the bowlers is to squeeze you. Make you do something crazy from frustration. Dots - especially in T20 - can be terrifying to a batsman and lead to desperate slogging.

So get your game head on.

You need a plan. Most batsmen tend to either “wait for the bad ball” or “swing for the fences”. This is a very traditional approach and one still taught by coaches who focus more on batsmen building innings.

In power plays this kind of approach is outdated. Heck, it’s even becoming outdated in 50 over cricket!

The modern mindset is to look to score a boundary through one of your stronger shots and if that fails, rotate the strike. There are “gears” for this, you can read about here.

Keep your head at this time and you will already be in a better place before any other changes!

Look at the green

Now imagine you are out in the middle and staring at seven or eight guys in the ring. Where next?

Look at the huge green spaces and ignore the relatively tiny blobs of people. There a lot less of them than there is grass.

When you realise there is much more green than there is white, you can aim for it. Simply remembering that fielders can't build a wall, no matter how good they are, will give you confidence and freedom.

How you do this is up to you. Some players are more traditional, other use footwork and bat angles to find spaces. If you are aware of your own strengths in games you can play to them and work on hitting those spaces between fielders.

There is always a gap

On top of this idea of gaps between fielders, is the reassuring knowledge that there will always be a space. Even the tightest ring field can't plug every gap. Nine fielders is not ever enough.

For example

If third man and fine leg are back you can pick up singles running the ball down
Ring fielders can be too deep so you can drop and run (especially true and mid off and mid on), or too close so you can hit past them.
A close catcher leaves a gap somewhere else you can manoeuvre the ball into.

It takes work to come up with reliable ways to hit these gaps because most bowlers will not serve you up balls to hit in these areas.So take a moment to pick a couple of safe scoring areas and work on making them reliable in nets, no matter how much people consider them creative or unorthodox.

I prefer effective to orthodox every day.

Hit over the top

Finally, you have the biggest gap of all: the vast area behind the fielders.

Don't slog.

You can power hit, play a more traditional lofted drive, scoop, ramp or slog sweep. it doesn’t matter. Whatever you are good at is fine. Aim for that vast open space and bat the ball there.

If you are not a power hitter, remember you don't need to clear the boundary, you only need to get it over the fielder's head. If you are good at clearing the ropes, you can work on getting so good you can ignore the fielder wherever they are because they are fishing it out of the bushes.

Practice to your strengths and go for gold.

It's easy to get frustrated and worry you are wasting balls. You feel time ticking and you are not scoring.

When you have that moment, remember that this is exactly what the bowler wants you to feel. So release the choke, reset, reconsider your options and get back to batting with freedom.

Improve Your Bowling with Variety

David Hinchliffe — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 06:26:00 +0000

How many times has a left arm seamer been picked because they offer “variety” to a cricket team?

In a world dominated by right-arm over medium pace bowlers, the promise of a different angle to batsmen is too tempting for selectors. And it works. Many batsmen find it hard to adapt to the change of angle. The left arm bowler gets more wickets.

It’s exactly this reason - creating problems for batsmen - that means any variety will help your team. Here are a few more ways.

Always pick a spinner

There are plenty of excuses not to pick a spinner. Maybe you don’t have any good ones in your club. Maybe the pitch is green. It doesn’t matter; you always have a spinner.

This is because batsmen who play spin well are rare. Even an average spinner causes problems simply by the fact there is less pace on the ball. Tail-enders especially can’t resist. Even if the ball does not turn an inch, there is still flight, dip, drift and variations of pace. Combine that with left arm spin and you are looking at a hero for all conditions.

Yes, there is a risk to blindly playing a spinner. You may be left with three seamers to do most of the work if your spinner does nothing. Yet, without that variety you will always be left wondering if you could have done more.

Get out of the corridor

Whatever arm or pace the bowlers use, you can offer variety through changes like going around the wicket, bowling yorkers and slower balls or just setting unusual fields: Anything that gets the batter out of their rhythm for a little while.

It may not work but as the saying goes; if you do what you always did, you get what you always got.

Of course, you might be confident enough with the skill of your reliable right arm over pitch it up medium pace bowlers to never worry. I'm willing to bet there are times when that extra effort was worth the risk. You can always find something to to do.

Change the bowling

Which brings us onto the last tip: If nothing is happening, change the bowling.

Give your main bowlers time to get a batsmen out, especially your spinners, but you also need to get that feel for when the batsmen are finding it easy: scoring runs without looking like getting out.

That is the time to switch to another bowler.

Keep spells short to confuse the batsman as much as you can. You can even swap ends with bowlers. The change might just be enough variety.

At club and school level you have to work with what you have. But even if you just have three right arm seamers and an occasional slow bowler you can create variety. It's not an exact science (it wouldn't be as much fun if it was) so get creative and never stop thinking when you cross that white line. You never know what might work.

The Unstoppable Power of Left Arm Pace Death Bowling

David Hinchliffe — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 07:48:02 +0000

If you have any pride in your left arm seam bowling, you need to bowl at the death in your cricket matches.

As a left armer, you have all the tools open to you of a righty, plus an extra one that makes you perfect for closing out a game. But it does require a great deal of skill.

Are you up for the challenge and chance to be the hero?

The wide yorker

Your weapon of difference is the wide yorker.

Deliver this ball into a small slot just inside the wide line and just in front of the popping crease (10cm or so).

This works because when you hit your yorker, you have cut off the leg side. You can pack the off side and keep the runs to a minimum. Against batsmen who go to leg at the death - most club and school cricket players - you will see increased frustration and more wickets from silly shots.

Wide yorker: yellow line

Practice your skills

Of course, you need to work on hitting this small target. Get it wrong and you will see the dreaded wide signalled.

Practice the ball often. Ideally against real batsmen as you can gauge how they react to it. However, you can bowl at cones, shoes or PitchVision as well.

If you feel you are making progress - about a 25% success rate is a good point - you can start to increase the difficulty by adding more variations.

Many left arm bowlers find it difficult to choose the right option for the right moment. As a result, their variety is often their biggest weakness. They have not worked out what to bowl and when to bowl it.

So practice this too.

For example, you might want a range of balls to bowl at a newer batsman while sticking to your wide yorker to get a set hitter off strike.

To increase your skill in this area, set a cone straight in front of the stumps 5 to 10cms in front of the popping crease and a cone on the same length just inside the off side wide line.

Hit the wide cone with every ball unless given a signal. As you run up, have a coach or team mate occasionally shout for you to hit the straight cone. If you get good at that, you can also add length balls and bouncers to the options.

Track your progress with PitchVision.

This way you are developing skills in a range of areas with your unique left arm twist. Captains will be begging for your cricket talents in no time!

4 Ways to Become a High Class Death Bowler

David Hinchliffe — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 06:39:00 +0000

Bowling the last few overs of an innings is like being a Hollywood star. When everything goes well you are adored. Put one foot wrong and your embarrassment could not be more exposed.

For the starlets it's wearing the wrong dress at a premier, for you it's getting clouted for 20 in the final over of the match. Same difference. So how do you avoid the cricketing equivalent of appearing on Perez Hilton?

Master the four balls of death

The secret to good death bowling comes in two parts:

Be able to bowl the four death deliveries better than anyone else
Know which of the four balls is the one to use

Both skills are tough. Learning to bowl a ball at will takes a lot of practice at creating a repeatable action. Knowing when to use it takes experience.

Let's take a look at each of the four balls and how best to use them.

1. Slower ball

The slower ball's job is to upset the rhythm of the batsman. It can be bowled in a number of ways (and to get the technique for them you should pick up copy of The Fast Bowler's Bible) but the trick is to do it without changing action.

This means the batsman is fooled into thinking the ball is arriving at normal speed and mis-times his shot.

Bowl it just short of a length to keep the pretence up, but avoid bowling it on a length he can play forward to as this gives him greater margin for error.

The danger with this ball is that the batsman spots it early and it just becomes a slow, shorter ball he can pull into the stands. Avoid this by making sure it's well disguised and use it sparingly, even at the death.

2. Length ball

We are taught that the best ball in cricket is the one that is hitting the top of off stump after pitching on a length that has the batsman undecided whether to play forward or back.

At the death this is risky, because the batsman is no longer playing 'properly' and is looking to hit the ball in unorthodox ways. The good length ball is easier to hit with premeditated shots over extra cover or midwicket.

However, it's still a good ball to have available in certain situations:

If there is still some movement in the air or off the pitch.
If the batsman is struggling to put bat on ball.
If the batsman is premeditating to hit everything to leg, bowling it wide outside off stump.

Don't be too quick to write off the good length ball at the death, it has a use if you are clever.

3. Bouncer

If you bowl a good pace on decent wickets, you can use the shorter ball to restrict the batsman's scoring area and with a well set field you will keep the runs down. There are two ways to use the short ball:

Stock ball. Batters who don't play the ball at the ribs well will struggle to score against the ball bowled accurately at chest height. If the pitch is hard and bouncy enough you can set your length so the ball reaches chest height with the yorker or slower ball as variation.
Shock ball. For those batsmen who are better at hooking and pulling (or are sitting on the back foot), the bouncer becomes a variation: Something to stop the batsman premeditating a front foot shot. It's especially good against the player who prefers to go off side in the death as the bouncer forces them to think twice about playing inside-out (i.e. stepping to the leg side to hit the ball through the covers).

With both these tactics, it's important to set a good field. Variations are many, but a deep midwicket, deep square leg and fine leg cut off the boundaries and take catches. Third man is up assuming there are field restrictions:

4. Yorker

The yorker, as we know, is a fast ball pitching at the toes of the batsman, usually around the popping crease, ideally with swing. This is the classic ball for death bowling: Full and straight.

The mantra is: If you miss, I hit.

It's hard to bowl as the margin for error is small. Bowl it too full and it becomes a low full toss and a free hit. Bowl it too short and it becomes a half volley and you will be fetching it from the crowd.

If you can get it right it becomes an excellent stock ball to use at the death. Unless the batsman is very good it can only be hit straight down the ground, so you can set your mid on, mid off, fine leg and third man back and straight to cut off the boundaries.

If you are using it as a stock ball you will need to practice it in the nets a lot both with and without batsmen. It's worth the effort if you know you are likely to be bowling at the end and might suffer 5 overs of the long handle.

It can also be used as a variation if you are using length or short bowling as the stock delivery.

Either way, the mark of a really good death bowler is one who can use the yorker to restrict scoring and take wickets because it is so difficult to master.

With all death bowling the key is not to be average at all four types of bowling, but to become really good at one or two. If you can master all four deliveries you will be unstoppable.