Yesterday's
Sunday Times contained a facinating article entitled
Ring of fire arguing that whilst Australian fielding has long been excellent... with the help of their American fielding coach, Mike Young, "they are leaving the rest of the world, not just England, far behind".
Quote:
Young, who has brought a fresh mind to fielding from an earlier career coaching baseball, reckons it takes years to refine a good technique based on vision and balance at the moment ball leaves bat.
His fielding drills are very different from the ones undertaken by England, which are generally run in a group environment. Young’s speciality is one-on-one sessions with key ring fielders such as Ponting, Andrew Symonds and Michael Clarke. He gets them to gather the ball with their back to the target, turn and throw at a set of short stumps, behind which is a small net, maybe three feet wide and two feet high. In Bombay, during the Champions Trophy, Ponting and Simon Katich were hitting the net almost every time.
[...]
Young’s innovative thinking is plain in some manoeuvres. White’s run-out of Bell in Brisbane — with a back-handed throw while lying on the ground — may have seemed fortuitous, but the Australians have clearly been practising such throws.
Later in the innings McGrath and Symonds attempted backhanded shies at the stumps off their own bowling, although both missed their targets.
[...]
“We have one or two set plays for each team,” he said. “If they run on this play and we catch the ball, eight out of 10 times they’re out if we hit. I’ll give you a clue. We have to have a left-handed thrower in the ring that can do certain things, though I’m not saying he’s the guy who is going to throw the ball. It’s a left-hander and right-hander working together.”
Some of the moves are almost balletic. In Brisbane, when Symonds and Clarke both swooped towards a ball that had been pushed into the covers, Symonds dropped to the ground in order to clear a path for the left-handed Clarke to throw to the non-striker’s end.
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If this is a sign of things to come then I for one will cheer: the notion that cricket should be taken seriously as "sport" has for too long been undermined by comic book performances in the field... and for once we're looking at a development in the sport that actually favours the bowlers
22-01-2007, 09:22 PM
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