Shifting from technique to trust

What a great time of year. The days are longer. The sun is warmer. And the sound of leather on willow can be heard again down at the local cricket club.

For all those young and old who have been working away in indoor nets over the winter, the time to compete again is here.

The winter months can be spent honing the technical aspects of batting. Any technical change requires hours of grooving and requires a specific mental routine in order to carry out. The type of mental routine that can become engrained pretty quickly.

Whether it’s transferring your weight into your strokes, head position and balance, where your hands finish in their back-lift or a pre-delivery movement, it's about getting outside of your comfort zone and working hard to make the changes you're after.

One of the challenges of spending hours honing these technical changes or improvements is that a player can become focused solely on their body positioning.

When you’re constantly hitting the ball into netting just a few meters away from you, it’s difficult to gain certainty as to just how good the outcome was.

It’s easy to slip into the habit of focusing on how you look rather than how many runs you’re scoring.

The best example of this I can recall is Ian Bell during the early years of his test career, particularly during the Ashes. He looked a million bucks. Has there been a more technically correct cover driver in the game? But it didn’t always translate into runs in the book. In the early days anyway.

Therein lies the challenge for all batsmen. It’s now time to shift our focus from how we look and feel towards practicing our mental routines and executing our batting plans against each bowler.

Training provides a good opportunity to begin this shift. Instead of being overly self-critical in the nets, start focusing on where the ball went, whether it’s in the gap based on the field the bowler has set you, and how many runs you are 'accumulating'.

Get back into that pure contest between bat and ball, rather than the contest between your mind and your body.

Honing technique is crucial to ensure long term success against the best bowlers in the game, and there’s a time and a place for it, but it’s runs that win matches.

Be grateful for those plays and misses, enjoy the French-cut fours that race past the keeper, and, most importantly remember why you first picked up a bat.

It’s time to trust all that work you’ve put in over the winter, find that optimal state of arousal, watch the ball and allow your instinct to take over.

Switch off that critical voice in your head, go out there and enjoy the contest.

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