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http://www.alloutcricket.com/blogs/sundries/aoc-book-club-the-plan-by-steve-james#00ShikpFXVrofdy6.99 AOC Book Club: The Plan By Steve James
.This week Steve James – former England batsman turned Daily Telegraph journalist – joins AOC Book Club. Having played under Duncan Fletcher at Glamorgan, James is a student of his coaching practises and in the following extract from his award-winning account of England’s journey from officially the worst Test side to world No.1, he reveals how the Zimbabwean revolutionised the way many of England’s batsman played spin, through the introduction of the famed ‘forward press’.
If Fletcher is famous for one particular piece of coaching advice then it is surely his urging of batsmen to use the ‘forward press’. Apologies for becoming technical here, but I do feel it is an important part of the story.
Fletcher especially advocated this trigger movement against spinners, but liked it to be used at all times if possible. It is basically a small step forward – not a lunge, because it is important that the head is kept behind the front leg – to ready the batsman before the ball is bowled.
This is how Fletcher used to explain its use to his charges. ‘This is the deal, guys,’ he would say. ‘You have a million-pound job, but the only snag is that you can only get to work each day by bus. And there is only one bus. It arrives punctually every day at eight o’clock. If you are late for work, you lose your job. So you have decision to make: do you get to the bus stop early, on time, or late?’
The answer, of course, is that you want to get there early – the ‘there’ in this case being the pitch of the ball. Ideally you would want to arrive there bang on time, but then you would run the risk of getting there late.
Trigger movements are a very modern phenomenon. Or at least the attention paid to them certainly is. In the old days batsmen were taught to stand still before the ball was bowled. And there are some players who still do that. But the truth is, however unpalatable it may be for the old-timers, that was advice dispensed in an age when all play was conducted at a slower pace. It is a dangerous policy having to make a decision so early as to where the ball will pitch when you have no idea about the degree to which the ball might swing or seam. It is much better to make small initial movements (ensuring you are momentarily still at the point of delivery, of course: a moving head means that the camera that is your eyes takes fuzzy pictures) and then another smaller movement.
That is at the heart of Fletcher’s advocacy of the forward press. On turning pitches against wily spinners many wickets are often taken at the close-catching positions of silly point and short leg. If you do not move before the ball is bowled, you are taking a big stride towards the ball and therefore creating considerable momentum towards it. It is often hard in such circumstances to stop the ball deflecting to those close fielders. Fletcher’s ‘forward press’ makes it much easier to kill the ball stone-dead in defence. How I wish I could have ‘pressed’ against the spinners (I think I naturally did so against the seamers). Fletcher tried to get me to do it, but I was too long in the tooth.
In the wet early summer of 2011 during yet another rain delay at one of the Tests against Sri Lanka, Sky Sports showed a re-run of the 1999 Sri Lanka Test at The Oval, my second and last Test. There I was, for my very last act in international cricket, lunging forward without a ‘press’ to Muttiah Muralitharan, caught at silly point off the glove. QED.
The ‘forward press’ also makes the sweep shot much easier. And Fletcher was hugely keen on the sweep, and indeed the sweep/slog. He was adamant that, especially on subcontinental pitches, they were the safest shots to play. Again the old-timers might advise to advance down the pitch and hit the ball straight, which is clearly sound counsel if you can get to the pitch of the ball and negate any spin. But what if you don’t quite get to the pitch, and the ball is spinning sharply? By still trying to hit down the ground with a straight bat, you are actually playing across the line of the ball. By sweeping you can smother that spin and you don’t need to know which way the ball is turning.
Fletcher worked out that it is better to crouch in your stance against spinners (as you naturally do in the ‘forward press’). Again this went against traditional theory. Young spin bowlers are told to flight the ball above the batsman’s eye-line, but Fletcher reckons it’s best for the batsman to be underneath that line of the ball. He thinks it is easier to pick up its length from there, with its reference points simpler to spot.
Euclid would have been proud of Fletcher. Just like the Greek mathematician who was known as the ‘father of geometry’, Fletcher loves his angles. He was constantly reminding his players of the sort of alignment requited to ‘hit the ball back where it comes from’, as the old adage goes. But that adage could be nebulous in its meaning. Fletcher made sure he was always much more specific in his advice. For example, for a left-hander bowling over the wicket, the right-hander was told to try to the hit the leg-stump at the far end. Not the stumps, but specifically the leg-stump. Or for the South African Makhaya Ntini, who bowls from very wide on the crease, to try to drill the ball straight back at his body.
With spinners, especially those who turn the ball prodigiously, it is more difficult. The old advice was always ‘play with the spin’. Say for a right-handed batsman facing a sharp-turning off-break, that would usually mean his going across his stumps to play to leg. Or for a left-hander facing the same bowler from over the wicket to close himself off and play everything through the off-side. Well, Fletcher revealed this to be tosh. ‘Try and play a straight ball with a straight bat’ were always his words. So for the right-hander to the off-spinner, it would be best to stay leg-side of the ball and, if the length was right, to play through the off-side with a straight bat, even if a dozy commentator might say ‘He’s playing against the spin there!’
It’s easier said than done, however. Marcus Trescothick had all sorts of problems understanding it, so much so that Fletcher playfully went out and bought a protractor to slip under his bedroom door on tour in Sri Lanka.
The trip to Pakistan and Sri Lanka in the winter of 2000/01 was Fletcher’s chance to put all these methods and theories into practice. This was new stuff to the England players, and, while Fletcher was making it quite plain that he thought this to be the best method, he wasn’t forcing it on anyone. Talk of the ‘forward press’, though, and two names immediately spring to mind: Trescothick and Vaughan.
Vaughan was undoubtedly the quickest of the England players to adapt to it. ‘He didn’t speak to me about it for a year or so,’ says Vaughan, which is surprising since his debut had come in South Africa in the winter of 1999/2000 and before their Asian adventure England had not been faced with too much spin thereafter, ‘but I think he felt I was a quick learner so he was never afraid of giving me new ideas. My thought when playing the forward press was that you were basically playing a forward defensive before the ball got there. That was Fletch’s theory so that you had so much more time to decide what attacking shot to play.’
Trescothick had made his international debut the previous summer, and was very much a Fletcher pick. He hung on Fletcher’s word and was very soon earning himself the nickname ‘Fletcher’s Son’. ‘The forward press changed my game really,’ he says now. ‘I started learning it in Pakistan, came home and did loads of work on it over Christmas, and then went back to Sri Lanka and it clicked. I got a hundred in the warm-up match [against Sri Lanka Colts], and then got my first Test hundred in the first Test at Galle.’
He had a different way of thinking about it from Vaughan. Trescothick would fake as if going down the pitch to the spinner. ‘I found it really hard to get used to,’ he admits. ‘I got stuck at first, so I just practised. Learning the timing was key for me. When am I going to “press”?’ You can ‘press’ too early (‘fall asleep at the bus stop’ as Fletcher says, going back to his original analogy).
Alastair Cook would never be termed a Fletcher acolyte – he was very friendly with Flintoff and Harmison, playing darts with them regularly on tour – but he knew the importance of the ‘forward press’ (as well as moving his hands lower on the bat handle, which, as Fletcher suggested, gave him more control against the spinners and was a feature of Andy Flower’s batting style too) and worked hard on its implementation into his game. It took him eight months, but he cracked it and still uses it now.
Andrew Strauss, who was not to make his Test debut until 2004, did not take to Fletcher’s methods of playing spin immediately. He preferred to play as he’d always done. Then he embarrassingly padded up to Warne at Edgbaston in 2005 and was bowled. Having turned a huge amount out of the rough outside Strauss’s off-stump, it was heralded as a ball to match Warne’s first in Ashes cricket, the one that bamboozled Mike Gatting at Old Trafford in 1993, but in truth Strauss, having gone way across his stumps, had played it poorly. He went to Fletcher afterwards and admitted that he needed to change his method against spin. Hours of work on the Merlyn machine followed.
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Topic: Starting your innings against spinners (Read 17813 times)