Pitching it right

Saturday was a gruelling day at the 2bm Private Ground. It was one of those hugely frustrating matches where the weather continued to intervene all day, and we found ourselves trawling the covers on and off the pitch at regular intervals.

On a day like that, it can be incredibly tough both physically, as you have to prepare your body for action several times, but also perhaps more importantly, mentally. I think my bowling spell was interrupted by three rain breaks in total, and each time the game had moved onto a new situation which required a different mind set and approach.

One of the most crucial skills as a bowler is to read the situation that you are bowling in, and adapt your approach accordingly. Different factors may condition the way you bowl. Sometimes it is the way the batsman is playing, or the areas in which he is looking to score. Too often, I see bowlers who are reactive in their field setting. The key to success is to try to read where a batsman wants to score. You can then choose to bowl to their strength and protect that part of the pitch reducing their run scoring capacity, or alternatively look to make it difficult for them to score in their particular zone.

One of the most critical areas a bowler needs to master though is their understanding of the pitch they are bowling on. One thing I try to do early on in any spell is to read the pace of the pitch. I suppose what I mean by this is that I try to test to see if the ball is coming onto the bat, whether there is bounce in the wicket or whether it is skidding on. By identifying this early, it can then give you a clue as to the best line, trajectory and speed of delivery that might be most productive in that situation. If you are inflexible in the way you can deliver the ball and adapt to your surroundings, it makes it much harder to be consistently successful as a bowler.

Once you have mastered the pace and bounce of the pitch you can then start to think carefully about the length to bowl. We talk heavily on the pitch and in the dressing room about ‘bowling a good length’ or ‘back of a length’ or a ‘full length’, but do players and bowlers actually understand what that means? Back of a length on one pitch may be different to that on another surface. With young players in particular, this terminology can be a little confusing. Perhaps what we should really talk about to bowlers is the shot we want the batsmen to play. “I want you to draw him forward but don’t let him drive you”, may be a better way to prescribe the particular length of delivery we are looking for. After all, it may change from batsman to batsman. I would hazard that James Taylor would have a different stride to Kevin Pietersen!

With a talented young group of bowlers forming at Kimberley, I hope that my experience can be of use as they start to establish themselves as 1^st XI bowlers over the coming seasons.

What is a 'good' pitch?

“How are the first team getting on?”, “They scored 320-4 off their 50 overs”, “Must have been a good wicket!”. It’s a conversation heard on many a cricket ground during the season. Yet is it really a good wicket? Surely what you actually mean is “that must have a been a good wicket to bat on!”

We all know that cricket is a batsmans game. I regularly have this conversation with my dad, pleading how unfair it is, and he regularly reminds me that people come to watch batsmen and not bowlers. Yet surely what matters as a spectator is the game being close rather than lots of runs being scored on a pitch as flat as a pancake.

Finding the right balance is always the challenge. As a bowler, while it is nice when the pitch offers you a lot of assistance, you also acknowledge that it is not fun watching one team get 70 all out while the other team struggle to chase it. What you really want is a wicket which rewards a bowler when they keep the ball in the right areas consistently enough. You just want it to do ‘a little bit’ so if you bowl well then the batsman is kept under pressure.

Getting this balance is crucial to keeping the equality in the battle between bowler and batsmen. After all, surely winning sports matches is about who has the best team, not just who has the most aggressive batsmen on a flat deck.

At Kimberley, we are renowned for producing ‘good wickets’. It is probably fair to say that generally conditions at Kimberley favour the batsman with the size of the boundaries and the fact the ball comes nicely on to the bat. However, it is very rare that as a bowler you don’t feel that you have something in it for you. As long as you maintain that status quo, it generally makes for good cricket matches.

Just because a wicket is easy to bat on, is it a good wicket?

There is no doubt that over time, cricket has definitely moved in the direction of helping batsmen. Whether it be big steps such as the advent of covered wickets, or the improved condition of bats, to smaller but still significant factors such as the two new white balls in ODI’s removing the bowlers ability to reverse swing the ball, and keeping the ball hard for 50 overs. In addition, umpires will abscond any bowler who slightly incurs on the pitch during follow through, yet a batsman is allowed to disturb the surface as much as he or she likes with their ‘gardening’.

Despite this, it is pleasing to see during the last week two excellent bowling performances for England putting them into this weekends Champions Trophy Final. Yet, many would complain that this was not down to them but actually a poor pitch with seamed and spun a little too much, the weather which helped the ball swing, and the South African bastmen who choked. Or maybe, just maybe, the bowlers bowled well…

Is it still possible to be a 'One Club Man'?

With football dominant in the British media, June and July always prove to be challenging months for the national broadcast and print journalists as they have to actually look beyond ‘our national game’ for stories to fill their papers. Yet despite this, it is still difficult for cricket or any other sport to knock a football story off the back page, even when an Aussie opening batsman is throwing out punches in Birmingham bars.

June and July are very much the month of the big summer transfer, and whether it be Gareth Bale, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney or Jose Mourinho, the papers are full of speculation of who is moving and where they are going to. For football, the summer transfer has long been the norm, as players look for pastures new and managers and coaches try to bolster squads.

Growing up in Lancashire and playing in the Northern Cricket League, transfers between clubs were very rare. You very much played for your local club, and once you had done so, you didn’t play anywhere else. Of course there were people who moved in and out of the area, so teams were renewed, and the odd person did move between clubs, but it was quite controversial when people did.

Having lived and played in the East Midlands now for nine years, I have been amazed at how easily people move between clubs within the same league, particularly in Nottinghamshire. This is no doubt partly down to the geographical tight nature of the league (the Northern League was stretched over a much larger distance and so swapping clubs was always harder), but as Jon Terry said to me during the week, it is almost as though the era of the ‘one club man’ is over.

I was very lucky to have been brought up playing cricket at Lancaster. A club steeped in history, it was great to come through the ranks from 4^th team to the 1^st team, and during that process, play alongside many senior players who previously been first team stalwarts. I can still remember playing in the fourth team with former first team legend Rodney Webb at Ripley St Thomas School at the age of 12, then with my dad in the second team before making the breakthrough into the first team. The role of the senior players in the club was not only to play at the highest standard for themselves, but also to put something back into the club when it was time for them to move aside. They did this by taking on roles as senior players in the second and third teams, adding that competitive drive, but also the experience and advice that young players could learn from.


In my early days I played for Lancaster 4th XI at Ripley St Thomas School



In recent weeks we have seen a number of mid-season transfers within the league, as players try to better the standard of cricket that they are playing. I would never begrudge anyone wanting to play at the highest standard they can. However, it is important that players remember their roots, and when the time comes, return to take on that development role that is so crucial in bringing through the next generation. I for one, would be more than happy to be back playing at Ripley St Thomas or Basil Russell one day, knowing I have had a hand in developing a future Premier League star.

It's just not cricket. Is it?

Saturday was obviously a hugely disappointing result for us coming off the back of a run of such positive matches. While I don’t think we rested on our laurels, Welbeck were certainly very fired up and perhaps wanted it more than we did. They outplayed us in the first ten overs of each innings, firstly through Jake Ball’s bowling and then Martin Dobson with the bat, and they were well worth their win at the end of the day.

When your up against it in a game like that, you have to look for any positives you can take out of the match, and when we removed Martin Dobson with the score on 90, we thought we might just be able to sneak a point. Our hopes were raised further when the new batsman knocked the cover off the ball when trying to tickle it down the leg side, and Sam Ogrizovic took the catch. To the fielders disbelief the umpire said no, and we were unable to make another breakthrough.

I have no issue with the umpire giving the ball not out, after all, he can only give what he sees and hears. However, as a batsman, should you walk when you know you have hit, as this lad did? It is an age-old question of sportsmanship that goes right back in time. Some people are ‘walkers’ others are not. Some ‘walk’ when its obvious but hang about when it is subtle.

Cricket is often held up as a game of morals in which players, play in the famous ‘spirit of the game’. Indeed, the Lords Taverners and the MCC pride themselves on taking this spirit of the game message around the world as a model for sporting behaviour. Yet when we look closely, how much of cricket now really encompasses sporting behaviour?

Let us look first at a couple of examples. The recent ODI that I watched on TV at Southampton had two incidents where the third umpire was needed to decided on whether a fielder had touched the rope. On both occasions the fielder was adamant that they hadn’t, and the TV footage was at best inconclusive. Yet the decision, was four runs on both occasions, challenging the fielders honesty. This has been seen too witch catches in the field being disallowed as the TV footage makes it look like the ball bounced, when we all know that sometimes it just lands on the fingers.

 

Is the third umpire to blame for damaging the spirit of cricket?

This challenging culture now permeates everything within our game at the top level. Yes we want to make sure the decision is correct, but does it set the right example to those playing at a grass roots level. When I grew up it was very rare for players to challenge other players on the validity of a dismissal or a piece of fielding. It was accepted that people were honest. Of course, on occasions some were not, but it was deemed that the weight of that on their conscience would be punishment enough. Nowadays it is quite common to see a batsman stand his ground, or for players to ‘try and get away with it’ due to the win at all costs culture that we have created.

I am not saying that this is wrong, or that I have not been party to such behaviour (anyone who has seen me on a coaching hockey on the touchline will know I look for every advantage possible!). I do however think it is time for the MCC to stop patronising people about the Spirit of Cricket, as at the moment, I struggle to understand what that really means.

I leave you with this… If you get a little snick on Saturday, will you walk or wait for the umpire to make a decision? I won’t judge you.

Heads of Tails?

As I was away last week I asked our scorer Rob Naylor to write on my behalf. Here is his article on the toss...

Greetings from the Scorebox.

As Gloves is away this week he has asked me to step in and offer my thoughts and I suppose an introduction is needed: I’m Rob Naylor and on a Saturday I score for KICC’s 1^st XI.

The Bank Holiday weekend was a good one for the Club as three of our four teams recorded positive results on Saturday. It certainly proved a particularly fruitful one for the 1^st XI as they picked up 36pts from a possible 40; a hard fought winning draw away at Farnsfield was followed up on Monday by a fairly comfortable 109 run victory over Papplewick & Linby at home and, after a quarter of the season, we find ourselves 5^th in the NPL table.

Anyway on with my choice of subject: The Toss. Now of course winning the toss doesn’t always guarantee success and it can lead to some poor calls; just ask Nasser Hussain or Ricky Ponting about their decisions at Brisbane in 2002 or Edgbaston in 2005. Even with that in mind it has long puzzled me why such an arbitrary method - that bears no relation to a team’s ability - is used to decide who gets to bat or bowl first in a cricket match; a wrong call by the Captain and a side finds themselves put in on a damp pitch or bowling first on a flat deck that offers nothing and having to watch the opposition pile up the runs and then face scoreboard pressure when they eventually get to bat.

For instance on Saturday Sam won the toss and opted to bat first on a good track and, thanks to an excellent opening stand of 145 from Paldip Sidhu and Jon Terry (both making 75) and a blitz at the death from James Mann (43*), he was able to watch the team post an impressive 259-5 and know that the pressure would be on Farnsfield to score at a tad over five-an-over to have a chance of winning the game. Arguably there is plenty of pressure in setting a good score, but the pressure of chasing certainly took its toll on several members of the Farnsfield middle-order as they got themselves out trying to force the run-rate against the slow bowlers.

So, how could the toss become less of an arbitrary affair? Well – get rid of it! The late, great cricket writer and commentator Christopher Martin-Jenkins in his 2007 MCC Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture talked about a bidding system and this has always interested me; the idea that, for instance, upon arriving to find a damp pitch and dull overhead conditions the two captains would propose how many runs they would wish to concede in order to bowl first on such a wicket. One captain says 30, the other 35 and with the winning bid he would then have the choice of batting or bowling. Of course such ‘bidding’ would have to take place in secret, perhaps placed in sealed envelopes, and be submitted to the umpires who then reveal what each captain has bid and go from there.

Without the time or space to go into greater detail I fully accept that there are of course many pros and cons to such a system, but I think that it could be made to work and it would certainly make decision making at the start a much more thoughtful and intriguing affair with captains, coaches et al having to get a good read on the pitch and conditions. There’s no doubt that many already try to do this, but come Saturday the question of batting or bowling will still rely on choosing a head or tail.