Here is an update from the SportCentral cricket academy.

The session on Sunday 18^th was a really good session. We discovered that our session would be cut an hour short due to the sport psychologist, Alistair Storrie would be paying a visit for the final hour to talk about what we would do in certain game situations.

We skipped out the strength and conditioning work and got straight to work on the batting drills. As a kind of warm up drill we were hitting a tennis ball of a tee into a set of goals. The size of the cones were small because Steve wanted to see if we had progressed in hitting the ball straight enough to put it into the gap. We all did pretty well at this drill and so we moved on to the next stage, hitting a moving ball.

We split into pairs for the next few drills. My partner was Graeme Taylor. The drill we had to do was hitting a moving ball, which was fed to you by your partner, and we had to hit the ball straight back past your partner into a set of cones. We each got six attempts to hit the balls in between the markers. We did this twice and we all did well at this as too. Steve then set us another competition. Again in pairs we had to try and hit six balls between a set of cones. Two points were given for every time we managed to hit the ball between the cones and one point for we hit a cone. Once we both had a go, we had to hit the balls into a different colour whilst staying in the same spot. This was so that we could play similar types of shots that we may have to play in a game. We got a shot each and then moved on to another two colours to finish off.

Steve was very pleased with the drill because we were hitting the balls straight and getting them in between the cones a lot. We moved onto a drop feed to see how ell we could play the straight drive and everyone scored 5 out of 6, which was really good, and so we didn’t have to continue with the exercise.

Our last drill was called quick fire, and is best used for playing spin bowlers. We would be fed six balls and we would have to get to the ball and hit it before it bounced twice. I was too slow to start off with but I got the grasp of it by the end.

And then the psychologist arrived and gave us a session. He started off by asking us about our greatest sporting achievement and what you felt, how the situation felt and what seemed to happen as you were performing at your best. He then gave us a game situation where we were set into pairs and had to bat and bowl as if in the last two overs of a 20/20 game. This was good because we were put under pressure and had to overcome it and perform well. After we had done that it was the end of the session.

Will keep everyone informed of our progress

Chris Morton