Monday, April 18, 2011

Bit of a practice

As the Easter Break has gone on and the weather has continued to be warm and sunny, I've been able to get outside a lot and have a muck about with the kids, cricket, football, run-outs in the woods, cycling and generally lots of walking around and this is all making my leg stronger. Last night, I power walked to the corner shop rather than take the car and that was okay too and it' something I may do again as it's low impact and it does build strength in the thighs. The most rigorous test was the run outs in the woods - uneven ground, kneeling and bending down and I came back from that with sore knees. The discomfort seems to be across the top of the knee now at the base of the thigh muscle and that day I applied ice to it for 15 minutes and that sorted it. At the minute I'm using massage and stretching and bit by bit that seems to be working. Yesterday or Saturday I bowled 12 overs worth of balls using the bound in my bowling action and I came away from that okay, so slowly it does seem that I recovering. Today I mowed the paddock and lowered the blades a bit and the cut now is pretty short. With the weather the paddock is already cracking up and as it's been very dry I'm not sure if it's as flat as it was last year and it seems as though there's a lot less bounce. The session today bowling off of 3 or 4 steps went quite well, very good line, some good turn when I bowl with my karate chop wrist position, but I had a tendency to bowl quite full. My wrong Uns good and the Flippers are coming out well in all four variations. I've been working with the Wrong wrong Un which is one that Grimmett himself gave up on deciding it didn't look as though it had any prospects. I bowled it a couple of years ago without the knowledge of Grimmetts experiments back in the 1930's. I came across it bowling the Googly and the Flipper combined and named it The Gipper not aware of its origins. My experiments with it came to nothing across a season, because I could only bowl it with a very exaggerated action, but a couple of months ago I bowled a Wrong Un primarily with the addition of the Flipper click rather than vice versa with a different emphasis. This new approach produced what felt like a Wrong Un but spun like a Leg Break and considerably faster than my conventional Leg Break. So today I threw a few and they look promising as a variation, but I couldn't get the length right, the line was good though, so a little more practice and the Wrong wrong un may be a viable variation?