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[mo_town]

Hopefully we can sustain the good run in the coming weeks...My only concern now is to focus on my batting...I recently got a BB B20 from Tai. The middle on it is amazing. The problem I have had in the past 2 innings with it is that I am trying to hit the ball to the next county from ball one. Got caught behind of a spinner in one game and got bowled off a spinner in the game in Sat. Hopefully in my next innings I will try to play it calm at the start of the innings and play myself in. Cant wait to see how far I can hit with the B20!

[HallamKeeper]

So this weekend we tied batting first. 255/9 played 255/9. It was a really good game. But it still doesn't make me feel very confident for the season if we continue as we have.

We started predictably slowly. I think we were about 96-6 at the halfway mark and then we just went ballistic. It was a great performance from 3 of our bats but it does underline our main issue. We are relying on bats 7-10 to score the majority of the runs in less than half the overs. When it comes off it looks good but it rarely does, especially chasing.

I feel we need to more aggressive to stop the bowlers settling into a rhythm. Certainly running hard helps but I wouldn't say we are terrible at that. But the field is usually very tight because we aren't hitting boundaries. So we prod around and then their slow bowlers come on and the field goes back and boundaries are still an issue when we are looking to up the rate. Again singles are fine but difficult against accurate bowling.

We bowled well in spells. But again I think we are too formulaic with our bowling. I don't know about others but the shine and shape of the ball is gone after the first 10 usually, we aren't great at looking after it but it still won't last long. Half the teams in the league have a very aggressive opener the other half have two slow scoring types who look to get to 50-0 once the opening bowlers are done. We use our better seamers to open and close an innings with our poorer bowlers at the start.

I often think we would be better using the first couple of overs for our quicks to hopefully nick 1 or 2 out then put our slower bowlers on for a bit and use our best bowlers for when they are looking to accelerate later on.

A bowler I used to play with moved teams and they had the sense to put him at 1st change instead of opening. I'd say he is one of the best 3 bowlers in the league. They open with tight accurate bowlers then bring him on to bowl very fast nasty stuff at 3-7 to blow them away. He opened when he played with me and often got 1 or 2 wickets but was just too good and missed the outside edge over and over. You could tell they were seeing him off. Now he comes on when you think you've seen off the openers and forces you to try to score off the canny slow bowler at the other end. Great tactics.

[SLA]

So this weekend we tied batting first. 255/9 played 255/9. It was a really good game. But it still doesn't make me feel very confident for the season if we continue as we have.

We started predictably slowly. I think we were about 96-6 at the halfway mark and then we just went ballistic. It was a great performance from 3 of our bats but it does underline our main issue. We are relying on bats 7-10 to score the majority of the runs in less than half the overs. When it comes off it looks good but it rarely does, especially chasing.

I feel we need to more aggressive to stop the bowlers settling into a rhythm. Certainly running hard helps but I wouldn't say we are terrible at that. But the field is usually very tight because we aren't hitting boundaries. So we prod around and then their slow bowlers come on and the field goes back and boundaries are still an issue when we are looking to up the rate. Again singles are fine but difficult against accurate bowling.

We bowled well in spells. But again I think we are too formulaic with our bowling. I don't know about others but the shine and shape of the ball is gone after the first 10 usually, we aren't great at looking after it but it still won't last long. Half the teams in the league have a very aggressive opener the other half have two slow scoring types who look to get to 50-0 once the opening bowlers are done. We use our better seamers to open and close an innings with our poorer bowlers at the start.

I often think we would be better using the first couple of overs for our quicks to hopefully nick 1 or 2 out then put our slower bowlers on for a bit and use our best bowlers for when they are looking to accelerate later on.

A bowler I used to play with moved teams and they had the sense to put him at 1st change instead of opening. I'd say he is one of the best 3 bowlers in the league. They open with tight accurate bowlers then bring him on to bowl very fast nasty stuff at 3-7 to blow them away. He opened when he played with me and often got 1 or 2 wickets but was just too good and missed the outside edge over and over. You could tell they were seeing him off. Now he comes on when you think you've seen off the openers and forces you to try to score off the canny slow bowler at the other end. Great tactics.

I'm sure I had a very similar discussion about these tactics with someone last week.

At 96-6, you're lucky you weren't 120 all out, certainly most of the clubs I've played for rarely have someone capable of scoring a 50 in the bottom 5. why are your best batsmen at 7-10? why not bat them higher?

[HallamKeeper]

I'm sure I had a very similar discussion about these tactics with someone last week.

At 96-6, you're lucky you weren't 120 all out, certainly most of the clubs I've played for rarely have someone capable of scoring a 50 in the bottom 5. why are your best batsmen at 7-10? why not bat them higher?

I have no idea. We tend to bat the 4 batsmen in the top 6 and everyone else is an allrounder who can each score 10-50 on their day (more likely when setting than chasing). I'm now a keeper who bats at 11, which I am really not happy about considering I was a number 5 two years ago who averaged 35.