105. When batting (especially at the start of an innings), keep your hands low in your back-lift, the faster balls are the fuller balls and also these are the ones that tend to hit the stumps so you want to be in position to counter these first and foremost. If the ball is short you should still have time to raise your hands to play it.

“Cricketing excellence lies beyond physical talent. Sporting success emanates from the whole person within – his temperament, emotional make-up, thinking ability and even prejudices.” Frank Tyson once wrote.

Sometimes we use shorthand and call this ‘character’ or ‘attitude’.  I like to think of it as the way you see the world, at least in cricketing terms.

104. Keep your eyes on the ball for as long as possible when ducking – move as late as you can by watching the ball as far as you can. The ball slows down dramatically after bouncing so don’t panic on short balls if you haven’t immediately picked it up in flight – chances are you will with plenty of time to watch it still and decide whether to take avoidance or hit the ball.

Don't tell anyone, but I have a little dream.

I dream of taking up leg spin. I admire the art and, frankly, you can go on a lot longer bowling spin than you can wicketkeeping.

One of the hallmarks of a well-drilled team is having fielders in specialist positions. This works because fielders can work on the specific skills they need in practice and become better in those areas.

But what are the skills and tactics of each fielding position that need to be worked on?

In this series of articles we will show you.

Update: due to huge demand, registrations for PitchVision Academy Live! Are now closed.

Slots are filling up fast for PitchVision Academy Live!, so if you are thinking of coming along to the Oval in London on the evening of August 27^th for the world’s first interactive coaching event, now is the time to act.

Cricket club selection meetings always bring up controversy.

In every club that puts out more than one team, there is bound to be the fringe player who splits the committee. In my club this is especially true of young players looking to break into the first XI.

I’ve sat on selection committee all this season and one of the qualifiers for whether a player is given a chance or not is if he ‘looks like a first team player’.

 When a side are doing badly it’s inevitable that extra nets are put on.

The logic is clear: If you practice you get better. Practice, as they say, makes perfect.

But if you were designing a way to practice to get better based on what we know about skill development, traditional nets are about as useful as bat with a hole in the middle.

Nets don’t work to get you better because they don’t fill the fundamentals of improving.

This is a guest article from Laurie Ward

In modern cricket-speak, losing captains are quick to say “we will take the positives from this game” when they have been played off the park.

But do they really? Or is it just fluff for the media?

In reality the team and coach will look at what went wrong in the cold light of day and then work hard to put things right.

An incident in the 2010 England-Pakistan Test series got me wondering how you play your games. Do you play in the Spirit of Cricket?

Leave a comment and let me know how hard you play.