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Cricket, as we keep telling ourselves, has changed out of all recognition in recent times but one of the most fundamental changes has crept up largely unnoticed, or at least largely undiscussed. We all know that the world’s elite cricketers play an awful lot of matches, whether it’s in the three formats of the international game or the many Twenty20 leagues that have spread like Japanese Knotweed, but what is less well acknowledged is how much time they also spend practising. This may be chiefly because it is something that is hard to keep tabs on: cricket net practice sessions, unlike matches, go unrecorded, and are not confined to simply designated training days. Some players commission one-on-one sessions with freelance coaches that they do not even tell their national boards or coaches about. But many of them are at it all the time.
Steve Smith, of course, has a lot to answer for. He famously hits what Justin Langer has termed “millions of balls”, and if Australia’s head coach is exaggerating, it may not be by much. As the most prolific Test match batsman of the age, Smith’s methods are spawning imitators, but plenty of others have independently pursued a similar path. Mark Ramprakash, England batting coach between 2014 and February 2019, describes Joe Root’s training sessions as “unbelievably long”, and like him Jos Buttler has always been an assiduous netter. If England arrange an optional net, those two are among the likeliest to bethere.
Interestingly, too, when England’s selectors ordered many of the World Cup-winning players to sit out parts of this winter’s New Zealand tour, Root, Buttler and Jonny Bairstow all interpreted the impending break not as an opportunity to rest but a chance to work on technique. In Bairstow’s case, he was left out of the Test leg with the express instruction to go away and work at his game. As for Root, he said: “To have the chance to spend time working on technical things without the pressure of a game around the corner is invaluable. You have to take these pockets of time as an opportunity to improve yourself.”
It seems that the modern player often prefers practising to playing, and the losers are their domestic first-class sides who rarely see them. Smith has played only eight Sheffield Shield matches for New South Wales since March 2014, and in the same period Root has appeared in just 13 County Championship matches for Yorkshire. In the last five seasons, Buttler has played six times in the Championship and Ben Stokes, arguably the hardest all-round trainer in the England squad, eight. Virat Kohli, Cheteshwar Pujara and Dinesh Karthik another set of ferocious workers, last played the Ranji Trophy seven years ago. For many, match-play as a means of preparation is dead.
The situation was little different in the 1990s, when the top players remained slaves to their counties, and compelled to play for them whenever they were free of international commitments. Play came first and practice was something you squeezed in where you could, if you wanted to. “We played too much,” Alec Stewart recalls. “But that’s how it was. You’d finish a Test on a Monday and play for your county on a Tuesday. So much has changed. The modern player would think we were mad.”
The turning point was the introduction of central contracts in 2000, allowing players more time off from turning out for their counties. Ramprakash was among the first recipients and remembered: “Players like Nasser Hussain and Graham Thorpe, once they got their mind on international cricket, were keen to keep it there rather than go back and play county games. They would rather have rest, preparation and hopefully quality nets. Others may have valued playing matches, scoring runs or taking wickets in the middle and gaining confidence from that.” Ramprakash himself liked to play – and net. “If there was an outdoor net and bowlers available, I’d take that. If they weren’t, then I’d pair up with someone and throw balls at each other, or go on the bowling machine. I wanted to hit balls.”
Duncan Fletcher, England’s head coach from 1999 to 2007, was a crucial figure in this transition. In 2005, he resisted calls for players to return to their counties between Ashes Tests, rightly recognising that they were emotionally and physically in need of recovery time. He also helped players with one-on-one net sessions, notably Michael Vaughan. “I was keen to have my own private net to work on technical aspects at my own pace,” Vaughan recalled in his autobiography. Andrew Strauss had solitary sessions against the new-fangled Merlyn bowling machine to prepare for his duels with Shane Warne.
Again, spool back to the 1980s when, according to Brearley, “net pitches would be worn or either useless or dangerous for batsmen a few weeks into the season”. Ramprakash, who twice toured the Caribbean as a player in the 1990s, remembers the nets at the Queen’s Park Oval, Trinidad as “lethal”, while there were other islands England would turn up to where there were no nets at all. Even in 2000, Fletcher in his first home season as England coach was denouncing the quality of the Lord’s nets. The invention of the sidearm thrower has also transformed the coach into a portable bowling machine, although some are more adept than others. England’s new head coach Chris Silverwood is rated “a mean dog-thrower” by one player. Ramprakash said: “The amount of practice a modern-day player can get is huge compared to 15–20 years ago. It’s probably gone up ten-fold. Bloody hell, even the analyst is in the nets whirling down balls.”
There are also many more coaches than there were. National teams, and county staffs, boast enormous back-room staffs, and they are routinely dragooned into service on team training days. There are also many more freelance coaches in operation, men such as Trent Woodhill, who acts as an adviser to Steve Smith and David Warner among many others, who call him in for a session as and when they need it. As Ed Smith, England’s national selector, said to me recently: “People’s expectations of practice, one-on-one coaching and support in every respect have gone up.” There are risks though. “Players play less and train more, but that means they need to be careful who they listen to,” Woodhill said. “Their coach’s views carry a lot of weight but they may not always be right.”
Net practice is best – if you get it right The big advantage with a net session is volume: a batsman can hit as many balls as he feels necessary, a bowler can bowl as many balls as he wants. If Steve Smith wants to hit thousands of balls, he can.
However, it’s not just about volume: quality has to be there as well. “It’s crucial how you practise,” said Stewart. “It’s got to be what I would call training with consequence. You must practise to get better otherwise it’s a pointless session. There are different types of practice too. Sometimes you train with high intensity, with bowlers coming in with new balls off long run-ups, other times it might be specific work on a technical thing, where everything is slowed down.” Ramprakash concurs: “I’ve had conversations with England players about hitting balls with a lack of purpose – well, what’s the point of that? When you come into the net, what are you looking to get out of it? That is very important.”
Graham Gooch, England’s batting coach before Ramprakash, aimed to teach the art of scoring ‘daddy hundreds’, but today most batting coaches see their task as giving a player’s game an MOT. “One of the coach’s roles is to have an intimate knowledge of a player’s game, how he is playing and spot if there are any differences occurring which they may not be aware of,” Ramprakash added. “I was very keen to get for each player some of their best performances on an iPad so that they could reference those in times of doubt, or struggle. Often footage is the best way.”
The rise in data analysis, developed for England by their lead analyst Nathan Leamon and proselytised by companies such as CricViz, also appears to have served bowlers better than batsmen in alerting them to flaws in opposition techniques. “When you’re facing the same opposition year in, year out you have to keep improving because you can be damn sure they will be thinking about what they can do the next time you come up against each other,” Ramprakash said. “If you stand still, someone will come up with something different. You could argue that is what has happened with Joe Root – even someone as good as Root must keep evolving.” The compact nature of modern series also means that once a batsman gets into difficulties against a particular bowler, there is little time to go away and come up with a counter-strategy – either in matches or the nets. We saw that with David Warner last summer against Broad.
“You can cultivate concentration in practice sessions but it does need discipline on the part of the player,” Ramprakash said. “It is probably something easier to do in one-to-one sessions over a couple of hours. For example, in St Lucia, I went with Joe [Root] to the nets and we had a couple of hours together. We did some technical work but also a bit of scenario work, trying to recreate match conditions with set fields.
But the sort of relentless batting for long periods we used to see from the likes of Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott is becoming rarer. To develop concentration, it helps to have routines, like Trott walking away to square leg and scratching his mark. Steve Smith too, obviously, has quite marked routines.”
For bowlers, there are other risks in not playing, too. In an earlier era, it would have been pretty much unthinkable for a frontline international player to go into a Test match without recent game-time behind him. These days it is commonplace. Last summer, England were content to play James Anderson in the first Test against Australia even though he had not played a match of any description for a month since breaking down with a calf injury. They trusted the judgement of the player himself and the medical staff , and how Anderson had performed in the nets in the build-up to the game, that he was now ready for action. In the event, he broke down again inside the first session of the game. Playing cricket as preparation may be out of fashion, but it does have advantages.
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| Cricket Net Practice |
Interestingly, too, when England’s selectors ordered many of the World Cup-winning players to sit out parts of this winter’s New Zealand tour, Root, Buttler and Jonny Bairstow all interpreted the impending break not as an opportunity to rest but a chance to work on technique. In Bairstow’s case, he was left out of the Test leg with the express instruction to go away and work at his game. As for Root, he said: “To have the chance to spend time working on technical things without the pressure of a game around the corner is invaluable. You have to take these pockets of time as an opportunity to improve yourself.”
It seems that the modern player often prefers practising to playing, and the losers are their domestic first-class sides who rarely see them. Smith has played only eight Sheffield Shield matches for New South Wales since March 2014, and in the same period Root has appeared in just 13 County Championship matches for Yorkshire. In the last five seasons, Buttler has played six times in the Championship and Ben Stokes, arguably the hardest all-round trainer in the England squad, eight. Virat Kohli, Cheteshwar Pujara and Dinesh Karthik another set of ferocious workers, last played the Ranji Trophy seven years ago. For many, match-play as a means of preparation is dead.
The bad old days
Let’s rewind a little. Prior to 1989, the idea of England players training ahead of a Test match had barely taken hold. The squad would gather at the venue only on the afternoon before the game, have a perfunctory net and then in the evening sit down to a dinner at which tactics would be discussed. On the morning of the game, players would turn up 75–90 minutes before the start. When Mike Brearley was re-appointed captain in 1981, he even had to reintroduce fielding drills because these had lapsed under his predecessor Ian Botham. Similarly, county pre-season training was minimal. Geoff Boycott had a reputation as a fanatical lover of net practice but in today’s world he would not stand out from the crowd.The situation was little different in the 1990s, when the top players remained slaves to their counties, and compelled to play for them whenever they were free of international commitments. Play came first and practice was something you squeezed in where you could, if you wanted to. “We played too much,” Alec Stewart recalls. “But that’s how it was. You’d finish a Test on a Monday and play for your county on a Tuesday. So much has changed. The modern player would think we were mad.”
The turning point was the introduction of central contracts in 2000, allowing players more time off from turning out for their counties. Ramprakash was among the first recipients and remembered: “Players like Nasser Hussain and Graham Thorpe, once they got their mind on international cricket, were keen to keep it there rather than go back and play county games. They would rather have rest, preparation and hopefully quality nets. Others may have valued playing matches, scoring runs or taking wickets in the middle and gaining confidence from that.” Ramprakash himself liked to play – and net. “If there was an outdoor net and bowlers available, I’d take that. If they weren’t, then I’d pair up with someone and throw balls at each other, or go on the bowling machine. I wanted to hit balls.”
Duncan Fletcher, England’s head coach from 1999 to 2007, was a crucial figure in this transition. In 2005, he resisted calls for players to return to their counties between Ashes Tests, rightly recognising that they were emotionally and physically in need of recovery time. He also helped players with one-on-one net sessions, notably Michael Vaughan. “I was keen to have my own private net to work on technical aspects at my own pace,” Vaughan recalled in his autobiography. Andrew Strauss had solitary sessions against the new-fangled Merlyn bowling machine to prepare for his duels with Shane Warne.
Tour matches as cricket net practice Game
What Fletcher also did was to recast England’s warm-up matches on tour as little more than training sessions, stripping them of fi rst-class status in favour of allowing perhaps 13 or 14 players the chance to bat or bowl. Subsequent England head coaches have adopted the same strategy; Trevor Bayliss converted a scheduled four-day match into two two-day games during which a player could bat more than once in the same innings. Others such as Andy Flower in Australia in 2010/11, saw the value of playing conventional matches with the aim of winning them and gaining momentum going into the Tests. Although he was involved in tours in which warm-up matches were downgraded, Ramprakash was not a fan. “It wasn’t something that was ever debated with me [as batting coach]. I’d assume a head coach and captain would have discussed how best to go about it. The modern player plays games on tour that are not necessarily of the intensity they used to be and there is the risk that may be exposed when you come into a first Test match. Personally, I liked to advocate middle practice, which takes more organisation but is better than a net. You can bring things to life with a keeper, a couple of slips, and fielders in place.”Better facilities for cricket net practice, more coaches
What has further changed the landscape is the enormous investment in facilities on the back of the greater wealth in the game. Today, most major cricket grounds have excellent outdoor and indoor training facilities, and most countries have national academies boasting state-of-the-art equipment, including gyms where players can develop the sort of core strength they need to achieve the athleticism and power-hitting the modern short-form games demand. A touring team is furnished with a battery of net bowlers at every venue.Again, spool back to the 1980s when, according to Brearley, “net pitches would be worn or either useless or dangerous for batsmen a few weeks into the season”. Ramprakash, who twice toured the Caribbean as a player in the 1990s, remembers the nets at the Queen’s Park Oval, Trinidad as “lethal”, while there were other islands England would turn up to where there were no nets at all. Even in 2000, Fletcher in his first home season as England coach was denouncing the quality of the Lord’s nets. The invention of the sidearm thrower has also transformed the coach into a portable bowling machine, although some are more adept than others. England’s new head coach Chris Silverwood is rated “a mean dog-thrower” by one player. Ramprakash said: “The amount of practice a modern-day player can get is huge compared to 15–20 years ago. It’s probably gone up ten-fold. Bloody hell, even the analyst is in the nets whirling down balls.”
There are also many more coaches than there were. National teams, and county staffs, boast enormous back-room staffs, and they are routinely dragooned into service on team training days. There are also many more freelance coaches in operation, men such as Trent Woodhill, who acts as an adviser to Steve Smith and David Warner among many others, who call him in for a session as and when they need it. As Ed Smith, England’s national selector, said to me recently: “People’s expectations of practice, one-on-one coaching and support in every respect have gone up.” There are risks though. “Players play less and train more, but that means they need to be careful who they listen to,” Woodhill said. “Their coach’s views carry a lot of weight but they may not always be right.”
Net practice is best – if you get it right The big advantage with a net session is volume: a batsman can hit as many balls as he feels necessary, a bowler can bowl as many balls as he wants. If Steve Smith wants to hit thousands of balls, he can.
However, it’s not just about volume: quality has to be there as well. “It’s crucial how you practise,” said Stewart. “It’s got to be what I would call training with consequence. You must practise to get better otherwise it’s a pointless session. There are different types of practice too. Sometimes you train with high intensity, with bowlers coming in with new balls off long run-ups, other times it might be specific work on a technical thing, where everything is slowed down.” Ramprakash concurs: “I’ve had conversations with England players about hitting balls with a lack of purpose – well, what’s the point of that? When you come into the net, what are you looking to get out of it? That is very important.”
Graham Gooch, England’s batting coach before Ramprakash, aimed to teach the art of scoring ‘daddy hundreds’, but today most batting coaches see their task as giving a player’s game an MOT. “One of the coach’s roles is to have an intimate knowledge of a player’s game, how he is playing and spot if there are any differences occurring which they may not be aware of,” Ramprakash added. “I was very keen to get for each player some of their best performances on an iPad so that they could reference those in times of doubt, or struggle. Often footage is the best way.”
Cricket Net Practice Tips and data analysis benefits bowlers
Bowlers benefi t hugely from more training. A generation ago, they had little opportunity to do anything but play, and it was a regime that broke the bodies of many fast bowlers. Central contracts were primarily designed to afford them vital rest, but they also allowed them time to deconstruct techniques and work on tactics with specialist coaches. Mark Wood referenced time in the nets working on his run-up in the second half of 2018 as the reason for his stellar return to form in the Caribbean earlier this year. Spin bowlers have also benefi ted from one-on-one coaching from specialist slow bowling gurus. After returning from winters playing grade cricket in Sydney, Mason Crane and Matt Parkinson said the most valuable aspect of their trips was their sessions with Stuart MacGill. It is not just newcomers whose progress may be accelerated by bespoke training sessions. “If you’re not playing as much, nets become very important for fast bowlers in terms of their evolution,” Ramprakash said. “Stuart Broad learned to bowl round the wicket to left-handers brilliantly but he felt it affected how he was bowling against right-handers. He went away and worked hard on his run-up, got his wrist more behind the ball, so that he was even able to take the ball away from the right-hander.”The rise in data analysis, developed for England by their lead analyst Nathan Leamon and proselytised by companies such as CricViz, also appears to have served bowlers better than batsmen in alerting them to flaws in opposition techniques. “When you’re facing the same opposition year in, year out you have to keep improving because you can be damn sure they will be thinking about what they can do the next time you come up against each other,” Ramprakash said. “If you stand still, someone will come up with something different. You could argue that is what has happened with Joe Root – even someone as good as Root must keep evolving.” The compact nature of modern series also means that once a batsman gets into difficulties against a particular bowler, there is little time to go away and come up with a counter-strategy – either in matches or the nets. We saw that with David Warner last summer against Broad.
The impact of white-ball cricket on Tests
The condensed nature of modern scheduling has made the life of multi-format batsmen especially challenging as they attempt to regularly re-calibrate their techniques to the white and red ball games. England’s recent struggles with the bat in Test cricket may reflect this. This puts a particular premium on high quality training in which a player might master the necessary adjustments. Ramprakash again: “One of the key things [for a batsman] is point of contact. In the one-day game where the ball doesn’t move much, batters throw their hands at the ball and try to drive on the up. You just can’t do that against the red ball. In the red-ball game, you’ve got to hit the ball later because it can move even in the last three yards of travel, and you have to be really precise. The rhythm of the [red-ball] game is also completely different. It’s a lot slower, there’s more time to think. Buttler’s hundred against India at Trent Bridge [in 2018] came off 152 balls but he left more balls in that innings than in the previous 30 Test match hundreds [scored for England]. His mindset was that if it is a bad ball I’m going to hit it for four but if it’s good I’m going to leave it. He did that brilliantly. It was a really efficient innings.” Not necessarily easy to replicate, though.How to teach concentration?
One of the biggest problems for batsmen playing little first-class cricket outside Test matches is retaining the ability – presumably one they first learned in county cricket before becoming an international player – to concentrate at the crease for long periods.“You can cultivate concentration in practice sessions but it does need discipline on the part of the player,” Ramprakash said. “It is probably something easier to do in one-to-one sessions over a couple of hours. For example, in St Lucia, I went with Joe [Root] to the nets and we had a couple of hours together. We did some technical work but also a bit of scenario work, trying to recreate match conditions with set fields.
But the sort of relentless batting for long periods we used to see from the likes of Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott is becoming rarer. To develop concentration, it helps to have routines, like Trott walking away to square leg and scratching his mark. Steve Smith too, obviously, has quite marked routines.”
So, practice or play?
Although the top players appear increasingly reluctant to use matches as preparation for their sport, the issue can still be the cause of tension between international and domestic managements. Aaron Finch, for instance, was earlier this year instructed to turn out for Victoria when he would have preferred to train. At some point, too, a player who has spent long hours refining his technique in the nets has to try out his new method in a match situation: is it going to be a domestic match or an international? “It’s about freshness of mind, freshness of body,” Stewart said. “What is more valuable, a good, hour-long net or potentially a four-hour hundred in a game that means something? I think the hundred adds more transferring training skills into match skills gives you massive confidence, although you do have to weigh up the hours spent on your feet in the field. Some people, given their mental and physical state, might be better off just training in the nets. You need to be flexible in your thinking.”For bowlers, there are other risks in not playing, too. In an earlier era, it would have been pretty much unthinkable for a frontline international player to go into a Test match without recent game-time behind him. These days it is commonplace. Last summer, England were content to play James Anderson in the first Test against Australia even though he had not played a match of any description for a month since breaking down with a calf injury. They trusted the judgement of the player himself and the medical staff , and how Anderson had performed in the nets in the build-up to the game, that he was now ready for action. In the event, he broke down again inside the first session of the game. Playing cricket as preparation may be out of fashion, but it does have advantages.
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