Here is an update from the SportCentral cricket academy.

Yesterday’s session (3rd Feb) was taken by Kari Anderson because Steve is back in Australia on holiday (lucky him). As usual we would start off with some strength and conditioning, but we had a little game to warm us up. We played some hand hockey, which is when you have a cricket ball and you can roll it on the ground, and throw it in the air trying to hit a set of stumps to score points. Unfortunately my team lost.

We then started the strength and conditioning work. We started off with the lunges first to cool us down. Once we had done three repetitions we moved onto the bridges. Again always painful.

After this we moved onto the batting drills we had done the previous session. We did the game from the last session to start off. I partnered with Graeme Taylor for the game. We did well winning both games. We then changed it so that we weren’t hitting it off a tee, we would be hitting the ball from a feed, again trying to hit the ball in between the set of cones. This was quite hard at first because if the feed was poor then we couldn’t play the shot we wanted to so balls were flying everywhere due to the lack of good feeding.

We improved on our feeding so we could play the shot we wanted to practice.

After that we moved on to doing some top handwork. We had to hold the bat with our top hand and play the shot trying to control where the ball went. We did this with a feed and again balls started to fly everywhere because we couldn’t control the shots well.

Our next exercise was a length judgement exercise. We had two stumps about 2metres apart and we had to throw a cricket ball and your partner had to say - full, short or stump trying to judge the length. This was good but because I hadn’t caught a cricket ball at pace before so when I caught the ball it hurt my hands pretty bad!

We then separated into groups of four and did this exercise in the nets. My first attempt nearly ended in disaster. The ball it the stump and jumped up and was going towards my face. I managed to get my glove up just in time to prevent it from hitting my head. This was a very good exercise because we had to watch the ball carefully so we could judge the length well. It was a bit of fun as well because we got to hit the ball in the nets, which we all hadn’t done in quite a while.

That was the last exercise in our session, it was a good session and I feel that my batting has already improved.

Will keep everyone informed of our progress.

Chris Morton