Tuesday, March 12, 2013

March 12th

 Joe’s had a good week this last week, he had some nice messages on Facebook about his return to the net sessions where he had a bowl, he’s been doing gymnastics at school on the horses and generally getting back to normal. This last weekend 9th & 10th I bought some batting pads for him and a pair of Slazenger spikes for the new season, he normally gets Ben’s hand me down ones, but Ben hasn’t worn spikes for a while turning down the offer last season from us to buy them, so Joe’s got a brand new pair for once!



So this weekend they had a session whereby they used the whole hall and set up like indoor cricket set up where everyone fielded and they used the bowling machine  instead of rotating the bowlers. Everyone batted having 15 balls where they lost 5 runs if their wicket was lost, then after 15 balls they had an extra 15 balls, where if they were out, that was it… dismissed. Ben batted okay apart from losing his wicket in the first 15 3 times and then lasted an extra few balls past the mandatory 15. Joe was offered the chance and with the prospect of batting with his new pads he accepted and did really well lasting up to 23 balls and only got dismissed once as I recall. I think he was quite pleased with his efforts and he got a lot of encouragement from the rest of the players.

 Kieran did well, as he always does with the training balls, smacking the ball miles through mid-wicket region, whether in real life it would clear the boundary or not is another matter and being in the air always runs the risk of being caught, but looked impressive nonetheless. I had a go as well and tried flicking the ball off the legs and doing the paddle sweep shot, didn’t do too bad. I copped one in the face at the outset, but it helped that the ball was only being bowled at 50 mph and straight and a Bola ball, as a opposed to a real cricket ball much faster or breaking from an off-spinner!

The limp

 The limp is probably getting better, but it seems as though Joe has good days and bad days with regards to the limp, a couple of weeks back it was hardly noticeable, whereas in the last week it seems to be more obvious, but we are looking at him having it for the summer with the hope that it fades over the summer.

 Scars

 As mentioned before, the progress of these is difficult to ascertain as it is a slow process (Scar healing) and not that obvious. In different types of light the scars are more obvious, so some days they look good, other days they look bad, but generally I still think they’re improving very slowly. I’m now only photographing them once a month, so that if there are any subtle changes, they might be visible in the images? But, because of the slow progress, I think Joe is less inclined to massage the scars because he doesn’t see any benefit in doing so, so we have to keep on at him constantly in order that he does do it.

 School cricket

 Yesterday 11th March, Joe had his first ever cricket session at school with Mr Ackred, I think there’s another bloke Mr white whose in charge of cricket this year whose even more enthusiastic about cricket than Ackred, who primarily is a rugby player, but who puts a lot of effort into the cricket team as far as I can make out. I can’t remember if I mentioned it before, but Joe won £200 for the school because of his Jack Petchey award win and he designated the money to be spent on cricket equipment. The session was indoors and from what Joe tells me they broke up into 3 groups based on ability, and prior experience… Boys that have some experience and were interested, boys that were interested and wanted to get involved and the final group… Football players. Joe was in the first group and his team won. He said that at this stage it was very basic – a version of Kwik Cricket where three sets of stumps where aligned side by side and the ball was bowled under-arm.

 
As yet there’s no cricket training in the evening or dinner time, Ben reckons that his team (3rd years) will struggle to get a team out, he seemed to think that by the time boys at his school reached the 3rd year they were more inclined to be wanting to go home and update their facebook accounts and preen their hair than go and play cricket, so he’s not holding out much hope. So we’ll have to watch that situation, but from conversations with his team manager at the club it does sound as though he’s going to be playing a lot of cricket outside of school this year, so it wont matter that much.