What IS Natural Talent?

It's always a curious thing when coaches and commentators talk about "natural talent". 

When someone does well they appear to have natural talent, according to experts and when they break records, do something exceptional or remain highly consistent, it is revered as natural ability.

But the truth is, if we do things over and over again this is what becomes natural. And that means you can change it.

Coaching (or teaching) can help you alter how you do things. If you are a batsman and continually get LBW for example, as with Shane Watson, the way you bat can be improved. In his case, a trigger, pre-delivery movement, would dramatically help. But this wouldn't be natural for him to attempt without grooving it over and over - until it felt natural. At this point, we would say that he had a natural style of batting, even though he had learned it.

Brett Lee suffered a stress fracture due to his 'natural' bowling action. So he changed it into what we see today. To us this looks natural and most commentators say this is a gift for him and 'how he bowls' even though he learned it.

There is a confusion over what is natural and the aptitude as humans we have to do something easily. Humans are pre-disposed with different assets that make running, throwing, jumping or hitting a ball, more likely. However, something is only natural if it has been nurtured, developed and learned. 

This is the most important thing to remember - apart from instinct we are all born with, all things in our life are learned experiences. It doesn't mean that all humans can do the same things equally well. It simply means that we are a product of what we have been taught, shared and absorbed.

Those who do exceptionally well as a cricketer clearly perform the most important tasks better than others. Whether this is physical, mental or tactical, those world class performers all share a similar group of 'assets'. There is a capacity to perform that others may not be able to show. 

Whether this is natural talent, for me, is highly unlikely. 

All tall people cannot be fast bowlers. All people with great reflexes and concentration cannot be great batsmen. So what is the 'gift' that people have that makes them exceptional?

Whatever you do more often than not, becomes natural, feels natural and looks natural. Being taught the right things is the main part of what appears to be natural, gifted talent. 

So is there a difference between what is natural and what is natural talent? It is just predisposition that differs, but the common denominator is always what has been learned.

And that comes down to coaching in the end, appropriate to the person receiving it. 

The Game Is In The Player's Hands

Stuart Broad's non-walk, when he hit the cover off the ball in the 1st Ashes Test at Trent Bridge has caused some controversy. 

Ex-players, current team mates and Anglophiles generally, have used the "he isn't the only one to cheat' defence... as if that is any type of defence against cheating.

It does seem unfair to focus exclusively on Broad here, which is maybe what those who seek to defend cheating allude to. Broad isn't the first (and will not be the last) to stand there when he knows he is out and cheats the umpire and the opposition by not walking off. The additional defence "That is the umpire's job" isn't really the point at play here.

Cricket is having a tough time of match and spot fixing right now. The game is suffering from those who choose the cheat and manipulate parts of the match. Players are suspected of cheating by scratching the cricket ball to affect it's condition so reverse swing can be achieved. There are those who deliberately go out to cheat, and there are those who simply cheat in the heat of the moment - such as claiming a catch when they knew it didn't carry.

It seems to be that players are now absolving themselves from any responsibility in cricket by leaving it all up the umpires, TV cameras or whether they 'get caught' doing something they shouldn't.

Cricket is under the severest of scrutiny. 

There is a simple way to assist with this. The answer is not to cheat. 

Playing in a recent match, one of out fielders took a perfectly good diving forward catch at cover point, inches from the turf. the local umpire said he couldn't see if it was taken cleanly, and the square leg umpire didn't see. So the batsman, who was half walking off, stood there and was given not out. The fielder could have been asked "did you catch that cleanly?" by the batsman, who would have accepted the catch as fair and walked off.

To those grandees of the game defending cheating I say this: it will only stop if there is a consequence of KNOWINGLY cheating. The shame of it is that punishments would have to be threatened in the first place - as you would think that any player wouldn't con another, or a whole team, or even a whole match, to start with.

Manipulating parts of the game to affect the outcome by cheating, would be a very good place to start a deterrent. Whatever has gone before is not a defence. It is how the game is played moving forward.

Just as with diving in football, cheating in cricket is an unacceptable face of the game that should be brought to book in some way.

Because if the players are not going to protect the integrity of their sport, if they are not going to speak up and say it is not right to cheat, and if those around the game think it is acceptable to cheat because others do, then like with match fixing and ball tampering, it will become 'part of the game' that is accepted.

Players and coaches hold the key. It isn't about the umpires on such morality.

Why "Ultimate Pace Secrets'?

It’s been frustrating to see the poor standard of fast bowling coaching globally.

Bowlers are often left alone to ‘fully develop’ according to so-called experts, yet end up with injury-prone actions. And instead of making often quite simple (and certainly obvious) changes those young quicks are grooving incorrect movements and biomechanics that are inefficient. 

This means that they have to compensate for problems and never quite fulfil their speed potential or length of career. Worse still, we discover stress injuries of spine, intercostal, knees and ankles as stresses are carried incorrectly through the body.

It does partly explain why we have seen the plethora of Strength & Conditioning coaches in cricket – to help make players ‘stronger’ (instead of better). Strength and stability have tended to be used as watch words for avoiding teaching correct actions in many cases. Yet the truth is Strength & Conditioning has a vital role to play.

The secrets of coaching pace and accuracy have yet to be picked up by much of the world. The plain truth is that basic knowledge of creating pace bowlers has not been known. Fast bowling is a process and like all processes, it can be learned.

The book allows all coaches, all players and all those involved with cricket at all levels to once and for all understand just how to achieve those ends.

The Fast Bowler’s Bible was ground breaking in 2006. This book finishes off what that book started. This one has the drills to go with the interventions and tweaks. If you choose to improve, this book will help you do exactly that.

The reason this book is your two and a half second coach is that it focuses on the most important part of pace bowling – the part that takes around two and half seconds. It starts as you approach the crease, includes your jump to the crease and then your action through it.


I wanted to write this book now because having travelled to many Test playing countries and spoken to hundreds of high-level coaches, it is clear that there is no consensus on how to bowl fast - even from them. It would be useful to have some pace bowling guidelines with regarding to coaching, that everyone can use and develop talent. What is evident is that nothing remotely useful is coming from coach educators on this subject and thus the coaches themselves rely on urban myths, wives tales and good old-fashioned incorrect information.

To those of you who have the incorrect belief that fast bowlers are born and not made (which was covered in The Fast Bowler’s Bible) are doctors born? Are racing drivers born, scientists, surgeons, dentists, architects or any other profession you choose to mention? Clearly we know that fast bowling is a process and since humans are process-based learners, we can learn how to bowl fast. 

It doesn’t mean that certain people aren’t pre-disposed with natural attributes and some people, without the slightest coaching, can fling the cricket ball quickly. In the same way people can run fast, or jump high, hit hard or swim quickly. But It isn’t about genetics, height, diet or other factors, as all of the processes for improving performance can be learned. Partly the problem exists because coaches tell people they cannot bowl fast. The only reason you would do this, is if you didn’t know how to coach it.

So I want to keep very complex information simple. I want everyone who reads this to be able to understand the processes of pace bowling. And I want everyone to be able to take this information and apply it. After all it is not knowledge that is important but the use of knowledge that will make you a better coach or player.

It therefore comes in two parts to coach speed – understanding how it is generated, then being able to apply it to live bowlers.

What I have done is explain how to bowl fast, then break down the reasons why that particular drill works and how you should go about training yourself to do it ‘naturally’. When you have adopted and adapted the new movements into your action then you will feel they have been there all along. This book is a walk-through guide to assist you if you seek ultimate pace.

What I wanted to also do is bust the many, many myths that surround fast bowling coaching. As you go through this book you will discover that there are some things you thought about fast bowling that might be shown to be just plain wrong. It stems from people never really questioning what they hear from others and simply repeating it as fact. Sadly much of it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. So we will show how pace is correctly generated and why the movements create power in your body to accelerate the ball out of your hand.

Strength & Conditioning coaching (S&C) has an important role to play as a function of fast bowling but not instead of it 

Let me be blunt. You do not bowl faster just because you are stronger. You cannot ‘muscle the ball” down to the batsman. Strength helps the body take the strain and rigours of the stresses that apply within the action, but the size of the muscle is not the deciding factor in generating speed in fast bowling.

I say this because teaching a bowler to compensate for problems of injury due to a poor action is not eliminating the cause of any issue. 

Understanding how to bowl fast and straight and having all the skill drills and correction techniques to go with it, can feel a little like being someone who knows where all the gold is buried but has no road map. I wanted to chart that road map so others could discover fast bowling ‘gold’. So this book is your guide if you choose to follow it. It is a blueprint for producing fast bowlers - or at least those who can maximise what natural attributes they already have. 

The one thing you need as a coach is a receptive audience. Plus you need to have full access to players and a large pool of them to have some success with. That is why I hope coaches who are in charge of fast bowling development, at all levels are open-minded to producing 100 mph fast bowlers regularly with the same progress that other sports have made such as running, throwing and swimming. It’s almost a ‘no-brainer’ to develop pace bowlers and we are already way behind in technical terms. Other than simply relying on Strength & Conditioning to make players fitter, the information is out there for improvement in actions that not only help prevent injury but also increase speed and control.

Hats off to anyone who wants to start learning how to produce genuine pace bowlers.

And one final thing before we start. If you stop for a second, that’s where you’ll finish. What I mean by that is you can do it. You can change your action by applying the drills and knowledge contained in this book. The only person who can stop you – is you.

Your challenge is in filtering the information you will be given based on anecdotal evidence, stories, tips of what others used to do and good old fashioned myths about speed.

Good luck with that and enjoy the journey.

https://shop.maverickscricket.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=BOOK003

The Confusion of Coaches

Let me be clear. You don't need pace to be a great seam or swing bowler. 

McGrath, Pollock and others have shown that through dogged battering of the cricket ball into the same area of the pitch, time after time, that eventually you will have success. Hitting your 'areas', bowling in 'the channel' and 'hitting the top of off stump' are the only key phrases  you probably need as a coach to reinforce the fact that pace isn't necessary to be successful.

Obviously, you have to move the ball in the air or off the pitch, too, but it is the incessant hammering of the same area of the pitch that will reap rewards. This is at least the message we all seek to portray.

At club level, the game is littered with 'weekend warriors' who ply their trade using this method. On slow, often soft, grassy pitches, it is a medium pacers' whet dream to just land the ball on the seam and watch it dart about. It is hard to get the ball away. Pace here isn't necessary, nor is it seen in abundance. 

However, this is the reservoir from which our next generation emerge. So the genuine quicks, those who have a passion for pace and a desire to rip through a batting line up, will often quickly realise they are in a minority. Coaches will tell them to slow down, bowl a line and length... and the prospect of producing pace bowlers ebbs away.

What's wrong though, is that if you could hit your areas at 5-8 mph faster, you would definitely take that as a bowler. I have yet to meet a bowler who wouldn't want an 'extra yard' of pace, meaning that speed does play a very big part of bowling development.

The problem stems from not understanding how to work with a bowler's action the develop that speed, make it more efficient, less injury prone and ultimately a better machine. After all it is the PROCESS of fast bowling that creates the OUTCOME we seek. And the better your processes, the more accurate and faster you become. The confusion of coaches is only looking at the outcome therefore and not how that is achieved. That confusion is furthered by the fact they don't now how to coach speed. And this comes from not being taught it in the first place as a coaches. So the ECB and national boards don't teach speed, the coaches don't teach speed, and thus fast bowlers don't maximise their speed. It's a medium pacers mentality that's great on 'bowling friendly' tracks, but falls apart in places like India often time - as can be seen by some of the poor track records of bowlers who go there.

Speed however, remains relevant in ALL situations and at all times. Particularly when the pitch offers the batsman an easy ride from seam. 95 mph deliveries unsettle the world's best. Striving for pace is clearly highly desirable.

Bowlers (like Chris Tremlett) have actions riddled with inefficiencies yet they have learned to bowl with them, rather than improve them. Does this make physics and biomechanics irrelevant? No, of course not. It simply means they have worked out over time, to be different from the Saturday club bowlers who also have such inefficient actions. In spite of the action, not because of it, is usually how bowlers are successful.

I often ask attendees at my speed workshops "why don't you see club cricketers with an action like Brett Lee?" To which most reply "because if you had that action, you wouldn't be playing club cricket". You gotta love an open mind that has been asked the right question.

So this is the nub of it. Bowlers have to focus on swing, seam, line, length etc because they do not spend much time working on their actions in the first place - actions, that if having a solid, repeatable and efficient machine are anything to go by, give you the consistency in the first place.

The brutal truth is, you HAVE to be accurate anyway as a bowler regardless of your speed. The slower you bowl, the less margin for error there is. You can get away with things at higher speeds that you cannot a lower speeds - fact. So I would like to see an encouragement for people to step up their speed rather than continually slow it down, which seems to be the populist view.

There is a coach education issue, a coaches' mentality issue, and a bowler issue that simply gets perpetuated over and over. Comfort is often sought in statistics that 'prove' people are right, and things which are not understood are dismissed as crackpot, irrelevant or simply left field. But if you seek world class best practice, you look at all the possibilities and instead of thinking "if it ain't broke don't fix it" you instead think "what can we do better to improve on what we have".  Most mindsets are sadly stuck in the comfort of the first thought - until they HAVE to change.

Speed, for speed's sake, is not what I advocate. It has to be accompanied with Accuracy. That's what ABSAT coaching means and is all about. 

But what I do believe is that you don't slow anything down to be better. You speed it up to be more effective. It isn't a 'lack' of anything - speed or control - we seek, but rather an increase in all our parts, that will make for far better cricketers.

Averageness starts by being complacent, and you only get progress when you challenge. With Dale Steyn at world number one for many years now, and no real contender to his throne... you have to question what in the world coaches are striving for. 

With the retirement of Shoaib Akthar and the imminent one of Brett Lee, the world has little to be excited about in pace terms. Steyn remains out on front, almost in a league of his own. 

Ultimately, a lack of pace doesn't make you a bad man, but the point is you don't have to sacrifice speed for anything. Not even for your outcomes. One day, when we all have big beards, perhaps that penny will finally drop.

www.ultimatepacefoundation.com

Ashes campaign will hinge on survival of the fittest fast bowlers

• From:The Times 
• December 18, 2012 12:00AM

• Increase Text Size
• Decrease Text Size
• Print

IF ENGLAND thinks that 2012 has been an intensive year then the next 12 months will be even more demanding.

With 10 Ashes Tests alone scheduled in back-to-back series between July 10 and January 7, 2014, the fast bowlers especially are facing gruelling demands on their bodies.

The onus will be on both sides to try to keep their pace attacks fit. There are ominous signs in the early departure from India of Stuart Broad with yet another injury, this time to his left heel, and Steven Finn because of a strain in his lower back, a problem that tends to set alarm bells ringing.

Ian Pont, who has worked extensively as a bowling coach and is the author of The Fast Bowler's Bible, believes that the strains imposed on ankles, knees and backs in particular mean that England will need six pace bowlers over the course of the Australian matches.

"We have the talent in England," Pont said. "It is a question of whether we can keep our best bowlers on the field.

"We are still to find the right balance between the technical and the strength and conditioning sides of bowling. England and Australia are more advanced than other countries, but we do still seem to get injuries."

Broad's trouble can be traced to a knee problem in September 2009. Before the end of that year, he firstly tore a buttock muscle, then jarred a shoulder in South Africa. A back spasm punctuated his tour of Bangladesh the following March. Although England took him out of cricket in the summer of 2010 to build up core strength, the unhappy run was about to get worse.

A torn stomach muscle forced him to miss the last three Tests of the 2010-11 Ashes plus the subsequent one-day series, and a side strain meant he also left the 2011 World Cup early. When he tore his shoulder muscle towards the end of the season it meant a third serious injury in less than a year.

The worrying trend of leaving tours early has continued this year. A calf injury cut short his series in Sri Lanka in March, with Andy Flower, the team director, admitting concern at a recurring issue. Now Broad is home again, the curtailed, wicketless India trip a nadir in his career when, at 26, he ought to be approaching his peak.

"He has one of the better actions, technically," Pont said. "If you have an area of weakness in the body I guess it follows logically that you become more susceptible there. Also, if a bowler has a problem, he might compensate and that causes a problem in another area. I do not know if that is the case with Broad, but his pace has dropped and he is nothing like as potent as he was."

Finn, 23, does not have the same catalogue of setbacks. England has been careful to introduce him gradually through one-day internationals into what will, fitness permitting, be regular Test action. He missed the first two Tests in India because of a thigh injury from fielding, but had already suffered back soreness in September before the latest trouble.

Pont has identified a technical issue with Finn's action.

"He falls a bit to the off-side and his arm comes down slightly from behind the umpire rather than straight," he said. "It may not be causing the injury, but people can slightly misalign an action and when that is repeated hundreds of times it can cause a weakness in the body."

Problems are far from unique to England. Australia has suffered even worse of late. It went into the final Test against South Africa recently without its entire first-choice attack of Peter Siddle, Ben Hilfenhaus, and James Pattinson. Ryan Harris and Pat Cummins were also unavailable. On Sunday, Hilfenhaus pulled up against Sri Lanka in Hobart with a side strain.

Studies from the National Performance Centre in Loughborough have shown that stress fractures affect up to 50 per cent of young fast bowlers, so everything begins from ensuring that bowlers can stand up to the rigours of such an unnatural job.

The importance of strength and conditioning work has filtered to the counties with ECB grants for specialist coaches.

England rests and rotates bowlers, but that has not prevented Broad or Finn from being injured.

"Since 2005 the strength and conditioning work has improved," Pont said. "The challenge is to bowl enough overs to make sure they are fit for purpose. It is difficult because they do not bowl a lot of overs in the nets, but then might bowl 25 in an innings and field for three days."

Jock Campbell, an expert in strength and conditioning and former physical performance manager to the Australia team, recently quoted from a study in Australia that showed to reduce risk of injury, bowlers should regularly send down no more than 30 overs per week. But guidelines go out of the window when a Test match is there to be won.

The Ashes matches will not just be won by pace, hostility and skill. Results will also come down to an old-fashioned Darwinian survival of the fittest.

THE TIMES

The Socialism Of Fast Bowling

I hate to be an old git about this, when I'm actually not. But I hanker after the 'old' days when the West Indies had 4, 5 maybe 6 genuine quick bowlers and scared the complete **** out of batsmen around the world.

Watching fast bowling today reminds me of watching something sanitised and put into boxes. It reeks of a standardising of quality and a multiplicity of sameness.

In political terms, this is a socialism of fast bowling where everyone must have the same, all should be the same and even look the same. "Get the wrist strong, shape the ball away, hit the right areas, pitch the ball up"... if you simply say this over and over, you may even end up as a bowling coach yourself. 

But bowling fast isn't about any of those things. That's because they are outcomes and not processes. And the truth is, we have lost the ability to actually coach speed - or at least understand the process that makes a fast bowler bowl fast in the first place.

Bowling fast is what the West Indies had. No one ever said to the West Indies "Get the wrist strong, shape the ball away, hit the right areas, pitch the ball up"... instead their mantra was bowl at 100mph and let the batsman negotiate the ball.

Watching Day 1 of the Aus v SA Test series showed exactly what I am talking about with pace bowling and where it has got to. However, the socialism of fast bowling starts way, way before this level and runs deep into junior coaching psyche. Is it any wonder that the robotic, repetitive averageness of fast-medium bowling is winning through? 

I have spent the past 18 months coaching on and off in India. I have seen bowlers with the passion to bowl fast being actively discouraged from trying to. The coaches instead preferring the socialism of fast bowling where no actual coaching needs to be done.

And this for me, is at the heart of it all.

If we can tick boxes, repeat mantras, pass coaching over to strength & conditioning, measure and manage players in the gym, focus on diets and nutrition, pay more interest in the mental side of the game, and lay out hundreds of cones, ski poles, gadgets and targets INSTEAD OF coaching speed into pace bowlers, then all is good with the game.

But the truth is all of that must be done ALONG SIDE coaching speed. Otherwise we have all the trimmings, but no turkey. We have all the tinsel but no Xmas tree. We have all the box ticking, but no fast bowlers.

Day 1 of the Test match showed a peppering of mid-130s kph (84 mph) deliveries. What's happened to the 150-155 kph (mid 90 mph) bowlers? 

For all the technology, training, props and gadgets, gym work, S&C, mantras and "get the wrist strong, shape the ball away, hit the right areas, pitch the ball up".... we have a complete levelling of the playing field in speed terms. And that is the problem.

Sanitisation or the socialism of fast bowling is now endemic. Coaches are being groomed to continue down this path. Educators actively pass on the methodology of blandness, mistakenly believing it to be excellence.

It would be time, before pace bowling is a lost art, to have a moratorium on speed and open the minds up to the truth that you can and you must coach the processes of fast bowling. It starts with understanding. It begins with knowing how to coach speed into bowlers and not out of them, as we appear to be witnessing in world cricket right now.

It's why I wrote Ultimate Pace Secrets https://shop.maverickscricket.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=BOOK003 and it's why I watch Test cricket with a sense of depression that fast bowling is starting to look like it's consigned to an earlier age when speed, and scaring the batsman, used to be part of a bowler's weaponry.

Speed and control are not exclusive. You can have both. The West Indies did. And you can coach both side by side. 

Let's start teaching speed. For the sake of mediocrity if nothing else and end this socialism of fast bowling that is a disservice to a whole generation.

No Good Knocking If No One's Home

I read today that Craig McDermott is going to take the 'injury prevention' video analysis around Australia to help identify potential issues in fast bowlers.

I saw this and thought that as obvious as this should be anyway, why is it that Cricket Australia isn't educating coaches in the first place? But I don't really want to single CA out to be fair to them. Even though the issues over Cummins have been well documented, and even though CA appeared to have left Cummins alone without correcting his lateral flexion and misalignment until it has finally caused a major problem, it still doesn't make them unique.

In fact, it simply makes them part of the vast majority who coach fast bowling, yet do not come to grips with teaching speed correctly or work out how to avoid injury properly.

The list is long. And the list is accepted as the 'norm'.

The Fast Bowler's Bible in 2006 and Ultimate Pace Secrets in 2012, explain and show how all of this is done correctly. Perhaps the international boards should read this stuff, buy a copy for every coach in their land, and thus educate on teaching fast bowling the right way. It would be far cheaper and less hassle than to go around correcting mistakes being made and having to restructure, rehab and redevelop bowlers AFTER they have had issues.

I think that one day, the penny will drop, but I might have a big beard by then.