At last … the year’s first cricket!

We finally had our first net session last night; a grand total of 18 turned up for 9pm only to be confronted by a group of indoor soccer players who had the hall booked until 9.30! (All sympathy should go to one of our guys who turned up at 8 and set the nets up by himself, :-o, only to have to put them away again for the footballers).

Undaunted, two of us started our warm-up outside the sports centre. And with a little bit of encouragement we managed to convince most of the rest to join in. By 9.15 we were all raring to go, so we got in a little game of Stumpball with a tennis ball to get the blood pumping.

So at 9.30 we got into the hall and set up the nets (again); two guys got padded up; 6 bowlers (3 per net) were given balls; and the remaining 10 got down to fielding drills. It’s a system that works well, as long as someone is organised enough to keep rotating the bowlers and batsmen through the fielding drills.

You could definitely tell there were some people that hadn’t been near a ball since last season, backing off to let balls bounce instead of attacking them – or not holding onto easy catches …. But I guess that’s why we have nets :D

At this point I got in for a bit of a bowl, and surprised myself. I was bowling off a few paces to try and get my line and length working, and it came together quite nicely. I was landing the ball consistently outside off stump, and keeping the seam upright which resulted in some nice deviations when pitching. Didn’t manage to get any wickets mind you, but managed to get a few past the edge of the bat and a couple I’m fairly sure were catchable with the field I would have been using.

Then came the batting – which is easily the worst part of my game. I’d been trying out some sock cricket and whacking a hockey ball off a wall for the last couple of months so I was keen to see if anything was improving. And initially it was quite good – I was picking up the line early; getting my head over the ball; and it was going where I was trying to send it. But then someone pegged in a full toss that I didn’t spot, I still managed to get on top of it and defend it into the ground. But for the rest of the net I was in knots! Couldn’t see the ball until late, and wasn’t getting my head near it! I reckon I’m going to have to do some more work on getting comfortable at the crease. But I’d bet there’s no substitute for time at the crease for getting this done. My biggest problem is that I’ve no-one to feed me throwdowns between training sessions – Maybe I’ll just have to make myself a bowling machine :)

Plenty to think about before next week … now that I’ve got a fresh picture in my head of what it’s like to face a ball I can revise my mental preparation. All in all, quite a good start I reckon – hopefully it’s all up from here!