Saturday, April 21, 2007

Another fantastic day on the weather front and partly down to the fact that by tomorrow night we'll be seeing the end of it with the forecast of rain next week I and a few others (What with the imminent matches approaching) made good use of it.

In attendance we had new Blokes IR Paul & Nakul. Regulars - Badger, Alex and myself. We all faced 7 overs trying to score as many runs as possible and not get out. Generally we all did fairly well, but still very low run averages per over, but an improvement on last weeks effort. Hopefully if Paul and Nakul are interested it looks like they might be our 10th and 11th players, but as yet we haven't broken the bad news that we charge a tenner for the formal practice sessions, which we'll have to do next week if they want to join in and then carry on the session through to the nets. That may put them off?

Nakul as expected is quite a good bowler, he decribed his action as being like a fast spin bowler, he's accurate and I think he took a couple of wickets at least. Paul's okay as well - another medium pace bowler, so if anyone thinks they've got a guaranteed bowling place in the team it might be time to think again or get some practicing in!

With that in mind have a look at Harrowdrives email from today -
Have you got your cricket goals in place?
Posted: 21 Apr 2007 02:06 AM CDT

In this post Dave makes the point about setting goals and using the visualisation technique amongst others as a part of your goal setting strategy. If you've been checking out my recent posts you'll see that I'm not happy to be throwing wide balls and potentially lose the game to a load of points given away in this manner, so I've set myself the goal of getting the percentage of wides I throw down to 15% or lower by the time we play the first match. In the post Dave advocates using a notebook at writing down your intentions and recording your progress. This is something I already do...



As you can see here I keep a notebook and record my bowling performance. The ticks are acceptable balls. The double ticks are balls that only just miss the stumps by millimetres, the 'Out's are self explanatory and the 'W's are the wides and the direction they go wide is indicated by the arrows. Then when I get home I have a count up and convert all the data into percentages and I'm able to see if I'm making any progress. I have noticed that short balls pitched around the 4 or 5 yard mark seem to give better results, so that's been a useful discovery and overall each practice session to date has seem improving % rates.


So much so that Badger and Alex both commented on my consistency and lack of wides. I didn't keep stats today but I certainly felt that it was one of my better sessions and I may have had the wides percentage well below 20% which is a very good improvement - possibly even 15% as there were so few. I also bowled a few maidens and took several wickets.


Badger batted well today justifying his position as No.5 I felt. I don't think I managed to bowl him once but at the same time he wasn't making a great many runs unless I was putting the ball down the legside. One thing that was good to see was that a few of us were scoring fours including myself managing to put a few down to deep fine leg and long leg - which was nice.
If anyone's up for it I'll be over there again tomorrow, so give us a call - You know you wanna!


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