Your gear is washed and ironed and your bag is packed ready for the evening’s battle. It’s a big Twenty20 game and you want to be at your best.

What should you eat to ensure you have enough energy on the night?

• During the day eat small meals every 2-3 hours. Avoid processed foods (including bread and pasta) and get plenty of low fat meat, low fat dairy, fruit and vegetables. Get some good fats from oily fish, eggs, unsalted nuts and/or olive oil.
• Drink plenty through the day. Water is perfect but nothing with sugar in. Tea, coffee (without milk or cream) and diet soft drinks are OK if you must and caffeine may even help with performance.
• A couple of hours before the match have a meal similar to this. Give yourself enough time to digest it.
• In the hour before the game and during the warm up sip a sport drink regularly made up of water and carbs/protein. Details on how to make this drink are below. Or you can buy it.
• During the match when you are batting, about to bat or in the field keep sipping the sport drink as much as you can up to 500ml per innings. If you are not waiting to bat there is no need to keep sipping the drink.
• Between innings take on as much of the workout drink as you can and still feel comfortable, especially if you expect to bat early or are in the field. The ideal amount to sip is 500ml per hour of play although you might not be able to get that much in (don’t fret if you can’t). Keep sipping as gulping it down can bloat you.
• After the game, cool down and have a whole food meal within 2 hours of the close of play based on your daytime eating. If you want a faster recovery you can included some pasta, rice, oats or bread and another sport drink.

For an even faster recovery you can supplement with fish oil and/or creatine, but that’s up to you.

The importance of a sport drink

Why is the workout drink so important for evening cricket?

Your body needs fuel as you play at the express pace and it needs it fast. Normal whole food simply can't process as fast and is heavier on your stomach. So you need to get the energy in liquid form.

This is where the very non-traditional workout drink comes in.

Sport drinks like Lucozade Sport provide a great burst of fast acting energy through liquid carbohydrates, but they lack an essential ingredient for performance and recovery: protein.

That’s why you need to customise your nutrition to meet the needs of short format cricket.

How to make a Twenty20 cricket 'workout' drink

The simplest way is to buy 1-3 litres of a sport drink and mix in 20g of unflavoured whey protein per litre (you can buy whey protein online or from health food shops like Holland & Barratt).

You can also mix water together with glucose and unflavoured whey protein (available from the same places). I like to mix this with a cordial for flavour.

Chocolate milk is a cheap option as it has a good balance (and has been researched). However, I find milk, summer sunshine and cricketers stomachs do not mix too well!

Finally, you can buy pre-made drinks with the right balance of protein and carbs. When looking for these drink go for something low in fat with a flavour you might like that has around a 2:1 balance.

Combine this good match day eating with a sensible diet for the rest of the week and you will see a big improvement in your ability to perform.

Photo credit: terry6082 Books