In the off-season

Winter training

In general, you should work on the technical aspects of your game during the off-season, and the tactical aspects during the season. Technical is working on such things as how to bowl the ball (your action) and how to play various strokes. Tactical is where to bowl the ball and where to hit the ball.

Be careful, if you are a pace bowler, not to try too hard on hard, unforgiving indoor surfaces. Work on refining your action and developing rhythm rather than emphasising pace and bounce.

In the month before the start of the season, weather permitting, you will be able to practise outdoors, where you can finish off the technical improvements gained during the off-season.

Playing Indoor Cricket

By all means play indoor cricket as:

• it is fun.
• it is fast paced, some calling it the indoor version of twenty20 cricket.
• it is beneficial to your cricket fitness, agility and reflexes.
• it helps improve the speed of your decision-making under pressure.
• all levels can play together and teams can be mixed.
• it will help you transition to the summer game, with skills honed in the indoor version.

Read about the game

There are dozens of coaching books on the market and in your local library. Take some time in the off-season to read one or two of these. You will learn a lot of tips and advice to help you become a better cricketer.

View coaching videos

Many excellent cricket skills DVDs are on the market and viewing them is an excellent way to improve your technique as you watch international players demonstrate particular skills.

Get a junior umpire’s qualification

As you get to the later teenage years you will need to start umpiring your own games. In many competitions it is a requirement that you have a player umpire qualification. Players as young as 12 years of age can gain these badges through attending a series of lectures and passing a straight-forward written exam. Your coach will advise you when these courses are available.

Apart from being a qualified player umpire, you will learn much about the laws of the game that will help to make you a better performer on the playing field.

Set goals for the coming season

Achievement goals provide motivation and can be long term, such as to win the competition or be selected for a rep team, or short term such as winning the next game. These goals need to be realistic and attainable. If you set them too high and do not achieve them, you may lose motivation. Discuss your goals with your coach.

Performance goals are more under your control. An example of this will be to learn to bowl a leg spinner. A performance goal describes the process or actions that lead to achievement goals. Again, discuss these with your coach.

Your goals:

• should be clear and should be written down.
• should be measurable. For example, bowling no more than one ball per over down the leg side.
• should be challenging but achievable.
• should be flexible. You may become more skilled at not bowling balls down the leg side and may want to re-set your goal to just one leg side delivery every three overs.

Develop your own personal improvement plan based on areas you believe need attention. Again, seek advice from your coach on what areas of your game should be in your personal plan.

Fitness for Cricket - Part Three

Team Spirit

A good team spirit will undoubtedly aid the potential for strong personal performance. Humour will lessen tension and anxiety; appropriate discipline will help focus practice routines. Team warm-up games and collective stretching routines help develop a collective team purpose and a sense of enjoyment belonging to the team. These will lead to a general feeling of both individual and team optimism, leading to all involved being in the right frame of mind in which to play the game.

Injuries

A cricketer who is improperly conditioned (unfit) to play cricket is more likely to suffer an injury than one who has followed a regular fitness training program. This is because tiredness or lack of coordination leads to faulty movements and loss of concentration.

If you are unlucky enough to suffer an injury, make sure that you are fully recovered before resuming training or playing. If you have suffered a muscle strain injury, you must be able to play without pain when the affected muscle has been tested to full stretch. This enforced period of rest should not, however, be used as an excuse to do nothing. You should use it as an opportunity to get fit to play. For example, if you have suffered a broken finger or an injured ankle, you can still exercise to maintain a good level of fitness.

This is especially important for young pace bowlers who suffer from sore backs or side strains. If you suffer such an injury, it is important that you get a respected bowling coach to check out the safety of your bowling action. Many a promising young pace bowler had his career ruined by continuing to bowl after such an injury with an unsafe bowling action.

Cricket is a game where there is a risk of injury. In tables of injury rates it is close behind the contact sports of rugby, league, football and hockey. Ball impact injuries have lessened in the last ten years with the almost universal use of batting helmets and thigh guards by today’s young cricketers. With today’s emphasis on health and safety it is important that schools, clubs, players and officials do all that is reasonably possible to lessen the chances of injuries.

Some of these requirements include:

• ensuring a flat outfield.
• ensuring good footing for bowlers in their run-ups and delivery strides.
• ensuring artificial pitches are flush with the surrounding outfield.
• ensuring watering outlets are carefully covered and flush with the outfield.
• ensuring outdoor and indoor nets have no holes and the run-ups and crease areas are flat and not subject to slippage.
• ensuring the playing and practice pitches are flat and clear of debris.
• ensuring that players are wearing suitable socks and footwear with good shock-absorbency.
• ensuring that all batsmen wear good quality, appropriate and suitably sized, protective equipment such as batting helmets, leather batting gloves, thigh pads, groin protector (box), and batting pads.
• ensuring that the team’s wicket-keeper is wearing good quality, close-fitting wicket-keeping gloves and a mouth guard. It is encouraging to see many young wicket-keepers wearing protective helmets when standing up to the stumps
• ensuring pace bowlers wear heavy long-sleeved sweaters after completing a bowling spell in order to keep the back and shoulders warm, especially on a cold day.

In Summary

As a young cricketer you should not be given, or be forced to undertake, too rigorous a training routine while you are undergoing your growth phases. The major emphasis should be on acquiring skills and improving technique. Most of you will have achieved sufficient general fitness from your winter sport program and/or your school physical education program.

If you are a young fast bowler, you must listen to any warning signals your body is giving you and avoid over-bowling. Get the safety of your bowling action checked out three or four times a year as it is easy for unsafe bad habits to creep in without you noticing them. Avoid trying too hard when training indoors on hard surfaces as many a young bowler has developed stress fractures in his teenage years through this practice.

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Fitness for Cricket - Part Two

Are you mentally fit for cricket?

How do you deal with anxiety and lack of confidence? How do you maintain your motivation levels? How do you manage to focus your attention, and then learn to relax?

Being mentally fit for cricket is as important as being physically fit. You must be able to deal with nerves, with the tension of the game situation, while being confident in your own capabilities. You must not fear failure. You must be able to concentrate on the task at hand, yet be able to relax when the pressure is less intense.

Mental preparation training can be practised for any cricketing activity. Before you score your first fifty or your first century, you must believe that you have the skills to achieve these. Before facing the opposition’s demon fast bowler you must have developed a mental plan to enable you to deal with each of his types of deliveries.

You should develop the habit of regularly rehearsing in your mind the processes involved in being successful at the task at hand. As you rehearse these movements in your mind, imagine how your body will feel when performing these skills.

Confidence

Confidence is a personal thing and varies from individual to individual. Nobody is fully confident all the time and the unknown or negative past experiences can always constitute a potential problem to your confidence. This can lead to fear of failure and a wish to avoid responsibility. For example, if you believe you have a problem playing leg spin and you know that your next opponent has two top-quality leg spinners, what should you do? You could try and avoid the problem by asking to bat in a position in the batting order where you are less likely to have to face these bowlers. Or you could regard this as a challenge to be faced head-on, and rehearse for a successful performance. By succeeding in this personal challenge your self-confidence will continue to grow.

Motivation

Cricket is not an easy game to master. In fact there is truth in the belief that no-one ever totally masters the game. Many enthusiastic young cricketers become over-whelmed by a run of disappointing performances and give up the game to go and pursue something less demanding. I hope that you will not be one of these, and that you will be a young cricketer prepared to pursue a search for excellence over a longer period of time.

Some cricketers are motivated by fear of failure, others by the need to achieve and be the best they can be. To maximize your level of motivation, you must develop a plan about what you want to achieve in the game. You should then set about achieving those planned goals, realizing that there will be unexpected set-backs along the way and that you will need to regularly revise your plan in order to overcome them. In this way your motivation levels will continue to grow as you achieve positive rewards in the coming months and years.

Concentration

This is a special mental skill which needs to be developed to a high level if you are to succeed as a young cricketer. If you are facing a demanding fast bowler, you need to be able to focus exclusively on the task at hand and not allow factors outside your control such as comments made by the fielding team or the disagreement you had with your brother at the breakfast table to lessen your concentration on the ball that is about to be bowled.

Concentration is all about having what is called an “uncluttered” mind, where your attention is solely on the brief moment of the task at hand. The mention of the briefness of the task at hand is important as you must learn to “switch off” between deliveries and relax your intense level of concentration until it is next required – when the bowler begins running in for his next delivery. Failing to do so will lead to mental exhaustion and a significant lessening of your ability to focus on the next delivery. This switching off is important for all actively involved in the game, bowlers, fielders and umpires included.

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Fitness for Cricket - Part One

How good is your endurance?

If you are a pace bowler you will need a high level of aerobic and muscular endurance in order to perform to your best. If you are a top-order batter keen to bat for long periods, you too will need to have high levels of endurance.

Are you strong enough?

If you are a pace bowler, do you have the necessary strength in your shoulders and arms to deliver the ball at top speed for four to seven over spells? Do you have the necessary strength in your hands, wrists and arms to swing your bat consistently in the right zones for long periods?

Are you flexible enough?

In cricket, your body will have to move in all directions in all aspects of the game. If your flexibility is poor, you will have difficulty in getting into the correct position to perform the tasks demanded of you. This is especially important if you are the team’s wicket-keeper. Lack of flexibility often results in poor performance and inefficient or faulty technique. It will lessen your speed and power and may contribute to injuries as your muscles will have to work harder to overcome resistance. Poor flexibility will make you tire more easily.

Are you fast enough?

In cricket the necessity for speed is most evident in fast bowlers, in batsmen when running between the wickets, and in out-fielders when chasing the ball that is heading towards the boundary.

How to improve your fitness

1. Go for a long run of at least 30 minutes once or twice a week.
2. Ask your coach to establish a circuit-training routine for you at your school or local gym. A basic circuit will target the development of your arms, shoulders, trunk and legs.
3. Have your coach design a weight training routine for you. Try to perform it at least twice a week. Use light weights and high repetitions to lessen the possibility of injury.
4. Make flexibility training a regular part of your practice and pregame routines. An increase in strength will not be of much benefit without an accompanying increase in mobility. Your coach will design a program for all team members to perform before practice and matches begin.
5. Practise to improve your reaction times. This can be done solo by bouncing a tennis ball off a wall or with devices such as Crazycatch, in groups with the traditional slip-catching cradle and organised training games that focus on speed of reaction.
6. Make sure you are an efficient runner. Cricket is primarily an endurance event interspersed with short bursts of speed. Eliminate sloppy habits from your running style such as head wobble and flapping arms which will reduce your speed and tire you more quickly.
7. Batsmen need to concentrate on developing flexibility and strength in the wrists and forearms. A strong neck is needed to support the weight of the batting helmet and powerful leg muscles are required for carrying the pads while running between the wickets.
8. Bowlers need good wrist flexibility and control. They need a strong and flexible lower back, groin and hamstrings.
9. Fielders need endurance for repeated chases, power for long throws, quick reactions for close catching, and flexibility for the bending and crouching that is required when stopping the ball in the outfield.
10. Wicket-keepers need the agility and speed of a trained gymnast. They need strong neck and shoulder muscles, power in their thigh and calf muscles and plenty of courage. They need to be especially careful to avoid muscle shortening due to constant crouching by regular stretching exercises during the game.
    
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