What To Do During The Off Season

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loopylegspinner said:
About 80 degrees on it's own but 100 degrees using my other hand (which I guess counts as cheating :))
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Unfortunately your right about the "cheating" part:D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=H836ERFcLeA

Never heard of freehand glowsticking:confused: But these wrist exercises could be useful for bowling! Especially if you use variations like the back of the hand slower ball. (which I use as a quicker ball) Do you think the back of the hand slower ball could be used as a replacement for the orthodox top spinner? I've noticed that my back of the hand slowie has much more revs than the normal top spinner and I can also bowl it faster and more accurate.
 
My club has just announced that winter nets start tomorrow! It'll be interesting to see what my bowling's like after 4 months without a decent bowling session. You can only improve so much by going on the computer and reading books so I can't wait to get back out there!
 
LLS, best of luck. Hopefully when you say 'nets', you will find it is indoor training for a few weeks perhaps followed by some well run net sessions that mirror game situations as closely as possible, but that is a whole different debate. If you do find yourself stuck with the traditional net (1 batter, usually slogging anything and everything, plus a range of bowlers including the keeper each bowling in turn) then all you can really do is work on your own game - ignore the batter and certainly the outcome and just try to focus on what you want to work on (whatever you deem appropriate) for the session. You are unlikely to get much rhythm but just use it as a chance to bowl a few balls in the relative warmth of a hall for now. Given that you are one of the younger players, my guess is you will get all sorts of advice and 'help' - listen, digest and be open to suggestions but make up your own mind, you are unlikely to be able (or need) to incorporate everything anyway but don't be dismissive, if you don't think something well help you can always go with the 'I am working on XYZ at the moment and want to see how that pans out first before changing anything else'.

All the best.
 
I've got to wait till Feb 14th, but the venue is brand spanking new and state of the art, apparently as it's a sports academy school in our area and a lot of money has been spent on it. Looking forward to, just got to get ready for it. Upper body is going okay - loads of press ups every day, constantly stretching and the occasional cardio workout mix with upper body and core strength drills. Slightly concerned about my legs and knees they're all feeling very feeble, I need to start getting out there and doing some power walking.

I agree with what Tony says above wholly and I'll be working on trying to spin the ball harder, after reading all the stuff that JV has been saying about drift I'm going to be trying to spin it a little harder and also work on my top-spinner and a slow flipper.
 
The biggest problem with nets is that they are so, so different from outdoor pitches as to make them next to useless for anything other than the most basic practice. Most club pitches are slow, low and take quite a bit of seam movement and spin. Most nets are stupidly fast and bouncy and absolutely straight as an arrow. In the nets every quick bowler looks terrifying, every spinner and medium pacer looks like cannon fodder.
 
It was pretty much a case of bowling with several other bowlers at a single batsman for 10 minutes and then a new batsman comes in and you do the same to him, but I did take a few positives from the session.

I really began to think about what ball I'm bowling and I managed to get a couple of wickets by out-thinking the batsman. In one case, I realised that one of the batsman was a real slogger, so I tempted him down the wicket with a couple of short loopy leg breaks and then bowled a fast yorker on middle stump which got him bowled.

Another one was against a new player who really liked to leave the balls outside off stump so I gradually brought the leg breaks wider and wider until he began to leave them and then gave my googly a real flick. It landed wider than I had intended but turned more than my leg break would have on a dry, crumbling pitch and hit the top of off!

I was the only spinner in the team who managed to turn it at all on the indoor surface which is a good sign and I bowled well in tandem with a fourteen year-old off-spinner who was bowling medium-pace that day. We managed to take a few wickets because of the way the other one had bowled and I felt in pretty good form.

So, other than the fact that it was pretty badly organised, It went well and I felt in decent touch!
 
Well here in France we started today but actually playing indoor is completely different especially for leg spinners. The ball doesn't even spin everything is different. And because we use the real ball look alike it goes really slow in the air. How can you practice indoors as a leg spinner ?
 
shahidpak said:
Well here in France we started today but actually playing indoor is completely different especially for leg spinners. The ball doesn't even spin everything is different. And because we use the real ball look alike it goes really slow in the air. How can you practice indoors as a leg spinner ?
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Just concentrate on running in, getting good spin, putting the ball on a length and don't worry about anything that happens after that.
 
As for an activity to do to just keep you fit, I really can't recommend squash enough. Its cheap*, its in the dry and warm, it gives you a really good aerobic workout, its great practice for hand-eye coordination and ball tracking, and its highly addictive.

Most people find it hard to motivate themselves to get off the sofa and go running or down the gym, myself included. Running and lifting weights just aren't much fun. Squash on the other hand I actively look forward to almost as much as I look forward to cricket. You don't have to join a league, just find some other blokes from your club that play casually and arrange a regular game.


*I've paid £20 for a racquet, £15 for some squash shoes, £40 a year for sports hall membership (which also covers me for nets) and its then just £3 per person for an hour.
 
someblokecalleddave said:
Have you heard the predictions about the worst winter for 100 years? If that's true no-ones going to be going anywhere this winter and if it's like 1961 no-ones going anywhere till April!!! Folklore indicators suggest there's an essence of truth in the prediction, have a look at how many berries are on the trees, folkelore would say this is nature gearing up for a bad winter...:(
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What happened to this worst winter ever then? :-D
 
I picked that up from the BBC news, they were reviewing the newspapers and it was a story that was on the front of the Daily Express. I then saw the same headline come up again on the front of the Express on the same program and the reviewers basically said "Oh here we go again, the Express running the same front page weather disaster prediction". It turns out it's something they always do and I obviously bought into it like a mug! :(

One's gotta be due soon though surely?
 
My pre-season training is going okay. My younger son who was run down by a car 2 years ago this coming April, still has a year before he's back to 100%. Last summer he got back into cricket having missed a whole season, he bowled well, but suffered loads of run-outs and was slow in the field as he'd suffered massive muscle wastage during his recovery. The physio's said that it's be two years once the pins were removed, so he'll be back to form for the 2015 season. He's working with me at the moment to get back on track with his fitness, so we go out running in the evenings, he's working on his pull-ups and his press-ups and hopefully this'll help him lose some of the weight that he's put on. But working with him means I'm getting out there as well, putting in the work to get my legs in order along with some cardio work and upper body. So hopefully this work will pay off come May.
 
Good stuff, Dave. Hope your prep goes well. Sound like a nightmare what your lad has been through.

My first net went okay although I realised after about an hour that my run up was two yards too short. Duh. As such I was bowling too slowly and inaccurately. The googly was very successful. It's a bit slower than my stock ball so tends to tempt batsmen down the wicket, leaving them vulnerable to being stumped. My stock ball wasn't quite so great, though, so I might stop bowling googlies for a while although I just can't resist them.
 
Darth Spin said:
Good stuff, Dave. Hope your prep goes well. Sound like a nightmare what your lad has been through.

My first net went okay although I realised after about an hour that my run up was two yards too short. Duh. As such I was bowling too slowly and inaccurately. The googly was very successful. It's a bit slower than my stock ball so tends to tempt batsmen down the wicket, leaving them vulnerable to being stumped. My stock ball wasn't quite so great, though, so I might stop bowling googlies for a while although I just can't resist them.
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Yeah, if you've got any inkling that you're losing your stock ball in any way, get back on it and put your googly on the back burner for a while.
 
Managed to contact a junior team from around here and they've invited me to indoor nets on Sunday. I picked up a junior ball for the first time ever and it seems tiny! Although, thinking about it, it's probably roughly the same 'hand size-ball size' ratio as you guys have with a senior cricket ball. It'll be interesting to see what sort of level I'm at compared to others my age as I've only ever compared myself to people who are 10 years older than me.
 
loopylegspinner said:
Managed to contact a junior team from around here and they've invited me to indoor nets on Sunday. I picked up a junior ball for the first time ever and it seems tiny! Although, thinking about it, it's probably roughly the same 'hand size-ball size' ratio as you guys have with a senior cricket ball. It'll be interesting to see what sort of level I'm at compared to others my age as I've only ever compared myself to people who are 10 years older than me.
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Nice one mate, you should find you'll be able to spin it far better. Hope it goes well, you might find that if they're a team that doesn't have any spin-bowlers or just finger spinners, they may try and tell you, you're doing it wrong and that you should try to bowl in some other way. Tell "No mate, I want to be a wrist-spinner, and this grips what I'm going with and thanks for your advice". Just try and relax and do what you do when you practice. Also remember, it's tough in the nets because there's no 'Proper outcome' for the batsmen... if they get it wrong they're not on their way back to the sheds, so that means they'll just try and slog every ball. It's nothing like a game situation, so if you do get slogged, just ignore it.
 
I haven't been on here for a while, so a quick update:
In the last few sessions with the juniors, I've felt in really good nick and realized that I had been letting the ball roll off the edge of my finger rather than giving it a rip, but I soon fixed this. The smaller ball really is a lot easier to properly spin, and after that junior session when I went back to the senior ball I couldn't quite manage to turn it the same as in the junior nets, until I visualized one of those slow motion shots of Shane Warne's hand as he releases the ball. This suddenly brought one ball from way outside leg, which my future captain left and it spun back, knocking over the stumps.
 
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