Change of tactics

It was sunny this evening with no real chance of a practice or anything and then out of the blue my older son said "Dad can we go over the field and play cricket"? As if I'd say no?

I while later we drove over to FTF after ringing Thomas (Who'd just got in and couldn't make it) only to arrive and find that the Fayre was in town and they'd set up on our field. This is normal but seems a bit early in the year? So we then opted to go over to Great Berry Open Space (GBOS). There were some kids practicing football on a one section of the field but we set up over the other and had a bit of a knock about. In between the boys mucking about with their pads and stuff I tried to bowl some balls but it was very uneventful which was disappointing. It was really cold as well despite the fact that the sun was out (The wind is in the East).

Next morning......

Now Friday and this morning I went over to GBOS and mowed the wicket for the first time. I noticed that it does look pretty lumpy, I'm not sure now whether the other field FTF is flatter? Anyway it's mowed and I can do this every Friday morning now and it'll no doubt draw the attention of the local blokes and they'll be expecting to see me and join in hopefully? I did notice the grass looks pretty thin and sparse though so it looks as though it's been so cold so far this spring that the grass hasn't had a chance to grow that much and it just looks horrible. Wont really know how it plays until we get a few of us on there and we start throwing balls around.

Anyway the change of tactics was that I'm going to start maintaining the GBOS practice wicket as well and try and Suhail out there with me and hopefully he'll be able to get a few other blokes on board and maybe it'll inlcude some of the FTF crew (Gloucester Park)?

Other than I'm getting through the Peter Philpott book gradually and have now reached a bit where he's been writing about the variations and the fact that so many of the Wrist Spinners in the past have had different takes on Leg Spin and grip the ball and spin the ball in a whole bunch of different ways. Basically what he says is that as long as your stock ball turns into the stumps from the legside and you can do it at will at differing degrees of severity you can experiment and come up with different variations of all the others, in fact the more variations you have the better but always with that proviso that you can bowl a good Leg Break at will.

On a forum yesterday I was talking to a kid that was saying that he was having trouble with his Wrong Un and just couldn't get it to turn, so (Possibly inspired by me and my advocacy to think outside of the box) he thought about it and tried flicking his wrist the wrong way and he says that with some practice he's got it to work. He was also bowling against a batsman and the batsman said that it was difficult to pick because it still looked like your bog standard Leg Break that you'd expect to turn from leg to off.

Looks like the weathers screwed for the weekend. It's our 10th wedding anniversary and my wifes birthday over the weekend so cricket is having to take a back seat for the next 2 days, but I'm still hoping to have an hour maybe Sunday afternoon? Worryingly the new "Gipper" ball seems a bit awry after that really good session last week when I was alternately bowling the ball and turning it at will into the stumps from both sides with accuracy and ample turn, so I want to have a good practice session where I can get in the zone and replicate that and try and get this new ball to what it was doing on that first day?