Edladd's Blog

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Re: The Specialist Tryer

Lol - specialist tryer. Hahaha.

I dunno, but I think there was more batting-allrounders and bowling-allrounders rather than pure allrounders. Because especially at the higher levels you bowling needs to be good enough to get wickets and your batting needs to be good enough to get 50s and get quite a bit of runs. If you average alright in both then you're really just filling in the numbers, just giving an option. You need to actually be able to have an influence on the game with both your batting and bowling to call yourself an allrounder, IMO. Like if you can win the game off your bat or with the ball.

Indoor has never really been something I've got into. Just doesn't seem my type of game. It's played in a pretty small space, yeah? Oh wait, you play a different version than I've played. I played the one where you bat in pairs and yeah, if you go out its like minus 5 runs. That version gives me the shits. You version seems better.
 
Re: The Specialist Tryer

I'm playing both these days, Friday's is the one where an out is -5 and you have to run. Thursday is the lone batsman on a team and an out is an out. Both have their merits.
 
The Duck Cup is MINE!

We'd our end of season dinner Friday night, was great craic. 50 odd people turned up, which is more than last year I think. At that dinner one of our founder members provided the highlight of the night by singing a lament he had composed! Lamenting the fact that Sandyford had never won a cup in it's first 23 years. I was looking forward to the sequel this year now that we have 2 cups under the belt - but unfortunately he wasn't able to make it. Apparently being on the wrong continent is sufficient reason not to attend the club dinner ;-p I'm sure he was as disappointed as the rest of us, it being the first one he's missed.

After the dinner the awards for the season were presented. I was looking forward to picking up my Duck Cup - and my impatience was obviously showing, as it was the first award of the evening.

Duck Cup!

As you can see in the picture - it's LITERALLY a Duck Cup :D I picked it up amid mild heckling (Good-natured of course), and had just sat down before I was called up again! This time for 4th team player of the year! Yeah, I know - a real award! :D Despite averaging 1.25 for them with the bat, I'd also managed 23 wickets at 10 each, so that was pretty sweet!

To top it off, I was also given one of the league medals from the 2nds campaign - which I was completely blown away by! I didn't think I'd contributed enough to the Inter B campaign to deserve one of the medals, but sure, if the skipper thinks so who am I to argue :D I played with them 4 times, and was due to play another that were rained off. And there were another one or two games that I was down for but replaced late on - so I suppose, it's a medal for being dependable :S

There's a ridiculous picture of me on the front page of our club site now too - behind a table-load of awards. They're not all mine, and I wasn't planning on stealing them - I swear!
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Re: The Duck Cup is MINE!

Congrats Ed! Man I sure wish I got a sweet ass Cup like the Duck Cup, looks good and practical :D
 
Re: Edladd's Blog

Well done Edladd looks like you would need a shopping trolley to take all those awards home with you
 
Re: Edladd's Blog

Nice one Ed, I've got my do coming up soon I don't suppose I'll be doing as well as you! I had a look at your picture - you're nothing like I imagined you'd look!
 
Re: Edladd's Blog

someblokecalleddave;275862 said:
Nice one Ed, I've got my do coming up soon I don't suppose I'll be doing as well as you! I had a look at your picture - you're nothing like I imagined you'd look!
Click to expand...

Yes, I am far more handsomer than people think :p
 
Re: Edladd's Blog

Wierd, maybe it's because I've mentioned a few times that I didn't play much sport before cricket? That's the best thing about an over-active metabolism :D I'm well informed that I won't be able to rely on it for much longer though :s
 
Re: Edladd's Blog

Nice going Ed! Congrats on picking up the player of the year award (And the Duck Cup of course lol). That's a real achievement, especially considering you started what, 2 years ago? Really awesome!
 
Re: Edladd's Blog

king_of_slaves;276838 said:
Nice going Ed! Congrats on picking up the player of the year award (And the Duck Cup of course lol). That's a real achievement, especially considering you started what, 2 years ago? Really awesome!
Click to expand...

Yeah - you've done amazingly well, far better than I have - maybe I might have a good year next year fingers crossed?
 
Been "Knocked for Six"?

Cheers lads :D Starting a coaching course tomorrow, so I might as well post this non-training related post now ;)


I've made no secret of the fact that the Irish as a people don't really "get" cricket for the most part. I think this is changing though, as the national team are making ripples and getting mentioned in the news, more and more people are coming around to it.

One thing that always fascinates me though, is the amount of cricket related terminology that has found it's way into everyday usage - even when people have no clue what it means!

You could say, they'd be "stumped" by it .... ahaha :*)

The amount of times I've heard people saying, right "off the bat", they've been "bowled over", or "caught out" on a "sticky wicket". I've heard people say when an elderly relative had died that he'd "had a good innings". I even heard someone on the radio the other day that a particularly prolific musician had a "good batting average". Apparently, "hat-trick" also originated in Cricket - and now it's been plagiarised by every other Tom, Dick and Harry sport.

This was brought home to me at the weekend, when I spotted an article in our local paper. It was about a member of a Gaelic football club that had taken charge of the scorebox for his 1000th game. The picture accompanying this was of him waving out of the box with "1000 not out" written out on the score display.

At first I thought I might be imagining this - I do have a tendency to imagine I've seen something crickety all the time, I think it's called obsession. But no, this time it was real. This hard-core GAA fan was using a cricket term.

It doesn't surprise me that there are terms from cricket out there in common use .... you don't spend hundreds of years in the psyche of an empire without seeping into the language. And in fact it's a two-way process, plenty of terms from other walks of life have drifted into cricketing parlance. What does surprise me is that people understand the terms - without having any grasp on the origin. I guess it just shows you how powerful cricket is - it can even get inside the heads of non-believers ;D
 
Coaching Course - session 1

We had our first session of the Level 1 Coaching Course last Saturday. It went pretty well really, I thought before the start of it that the other lads on the course would have a huge advantage because they were likely to have way more experience - but as it turned out, that really didn't matter much! It's nearly an disadvantage in some ways, I'm quite happy to accept that doing things by the book is better than the way I'm doing it. One or two of the others were more inclined to say things like "Well I've been doing it like this for years and ...". At the end of the day, everyone probably does have their own adaptations to suit the techniques to themselves - but when you're teaching a newbie - it's probably best to show them the universally "right" way, and let them start playing around with it themselves. Certainly better than teaching them the quirk that works for you, even when you don't really know why!

The impression I've got after the first day is that the "secret" to being a coach is not necessarily how much you know, but how you get the information across. And the greatest weapon you have for achieving this? Preparation! If you're showing a bunch of kids the pull shot, you'd better be damn sure you know in advance how every part of the session should work (with room for flexibility if needed). There's no point starting the session, and every few minutes interrupting yourself to add a point you forgot - or having to figure out how to demonstrate the skill on the fly. All you'd be doing is undermining yourself - and getting a group of kids to listen to you is hard enough anyway.

It's also good to know that there are lots of the basics that I haven't been doing right (or at all). I'd hate to think that I have been using good technique and still can't bat - that might suggest that I'm just rubbish ;)

Also - well done to the Irish team that managed to win the Intercontinental cup for the third time in a row! They recovered from a pretty poor first innings performance to win by 9 wickets in the 2nd innings, Cusack getting a deserved man of the match award for a gutsy 95* in the first innings to get the Irish close enough to make the result an option.
 
The Mystery of Timing

Just had my last session of work related indoor cricket! A record showing of three turned up strangely, so we just had a single wicket competion. Two overs batting in the innings - one against each of the other two bowling. In the time we had we managed to get in three of these games, so not too bad, six overs of batting, six overs of fielding (read running around like a headless chicken), and six overs of bowling.

I was keen to try out a few of the bits and pieces from the coaching course. Obviously, I've been doing a bit myself - knocking a ball against a wall to practice driving, and a bit of one-step bowling. But I was surprised, nay shocked!, by how well I did today. In the 6 overs, I managed to score 47 runs, (and get out twice, but I'll forget about that until we've done the forward defense ;) ). In the bowling, I was trying to include the hip-drive, by pushing the front knee through - this resulted in a quicker ball every time I remembered to do it! Picked up a few wickets clean bowled with this, along with a reflex C&B off a slower ball.

The big difference in the batting, I think, was that I was more relaxed since I had an idea what I was trying to do - and that I was using the "backswing and step". These both contributed to a more fluid, straight, and powerful shot. It was a bit bizarre, in that I felt like I was hitting the ball with less effort and still getting it to race away to the back wall :/ I guess that's how timing works :)

I did hit a bump in one of my middle overs where I was trying to force the ball away, and reverted to swings and misses; edges going in the air; and driving the ball straight into the ground. But I recognised the issue, made myself relax - just watch the ball - and react ... and things came good!

Hopefully with a good winter re-inforcing the basics I can go out next year and do some damage. Priority going to beating this years average of 1 :D
 
Re: The Mystery of Timing

Sorry for the latish reply, but congrats on all the awards! That's awesome mate, well done.
 
Coaching Course - Session 2

We'd the second session of the coaching course today - and I'm bloody wrecked after it!! We warmed up with a game quite like stumpball, but the objective was to complete 10 passes to score a point. I couldn't breathe after it, which I was a bit surprised by. I'm not super-fit or anything like it, but I can normally run about for 5 minutes without hyperventilating. I've since developed a bit of a chesty cough though - so I reckon that goes some way to explain it, must have been coming on since before today.

We covered a bit of fielding (intercepting and retrieving), a bit of wicketkeeping and a few back foot shots. We also did the run-up and bound - which was a complete head-wreck! I think the problem is that the bowling action is fairly complicated, with different parts of the body doing different things - and in order to match it to the technical model, you have to try and hold all the different parts in your head at the same time!

We finished the session off with the "full hit to leg". Basically it's a cross batted shot to a full toss about waist high on leg stump. Front foot towards the ball - down on the back knee - and smash the ball to the leg side boundary! Feels great when it works, but there is a danger with it, if you don't pick the right ball top edges are nigh on inevitable. Last season, this is pretty much the shot I used to get my boundary (yes singular!), off a very long hop by a leg spinner. It's also quite close to the shot that I got caught off in a cup match to a full toss :/ Win some lose some I suppose!!
 
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