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**Official** New Zealand Domestic Season 2013/2014

Bahnz

Bahnz

Hall of Fame Member
Flem274* said:
Hahaha do I want to know?

Wasn't he out to Bennett? Picking a drive to a ball that wasn't full enough and bounced a bit too high. Well I hope so anyway, because him getting out to a strength >>>>> lunging forward to Astle.
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Not so much a drive as a hard handed forward prod. But otherwise yeah, spot on.
 
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R

RxGM

U19 Vice-Captain
Bahnz said:
Not so much a drive as a hard handed forward prod. But otherwise yeah, spot on.
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In Guppys defence he was batting on one leg so im not surprised his feet went nowhere, also his dismissal looks a lot better the Brownlie's did in the first innings. Trying to smack the leather off an in swinging Yorker and getting cleaned up
 
Kippax

Kippax

Cricketer Of The Year
Cricket | Lift in Bats Produces Lift in Averages | Stuff.co.nz

Michael Papps arrived in Wellington having amassed more first-class runs than any player in Canterbury's history.

The problem was he seemed to have left them all there.

Papps scored just 378 Plunket Shield runs, at 22.23, in his first summer for the Firebirds. Not only couldn't be buy a run in that 2011/12 season, the opening batsman looked bad as well.

There was a good reason for that. Jamie Siddons had just come to town and his first order of business as Wellington coach was to tinker with a few techniques.

Siddons believed in players having their bats raised before the ball was delivered and their front foot and weight going down the wicket, rather than across the crease or towards the pitch of the delivery. That would help them "access" different shots and more power.

For Papps, that meant learning how to bat all over again.

"That first year was a little up and down," Papps said this week.

"It's not easy to change in-season so, not this offseason but the one before, was really important. I went away, worked on things till they got to a level where I was confident and that showed."

Papps made 810 runs, at 45, last summer and after two four-day games this season the former Black Cap is averaging over 75.

He was 32 when this process began, with a method that had been well honed.

"It's not easy to adopt new things when you get older. But I can definitely vouch for it working for me and I can see other guys getting benefit from it as well."

So could the rest of the coaching staff at Cricket Wellington (CW).

There had initially been scepticism about Siddons and his "way". But when an old bloke like Papps was suddenly hitting balls back over bowlers' heads, en route to scoring 609 runs at 76.12 in last season's 50-over competition, that changed.

Siddons' philosophy is now applied across the board in all of CW's programmes, right down to the 13-year-olds starting out in the Future Firebirds' scheme.

"To be totally honest, we've not been very good at producing batsmen," CW college cricket co-ordinator Rhys Morgan said.

"Take James Franklin out of the equation, whose batting's improved as his career's gone on, but before that you're looking at the likes of [Bruce] Edgar as the last guy we brought through the school ranks and turned into a pretty good international batsman.

"Things really had to change."

Which has meant unbundling the games of Year 9 and 10 players and giving them the tools to hit the ball hard and straight.

"It's about early preparation, in terms of picking your bat up, and there was maybe a little bit of a misunderstanding around the fact people thought it was just about a high backlift," said Morgan.

"It's more about an early backlift and making sure you're ready to play the ball."

Papps had always waited till he'd assessed the ball's line and length, before starting his pick-up. His fear with taking it up early was that it would give him less time and fewer options, but the opposite has been true.

As Morgan often tells his teenaged players.

"They say 'I don't need to move my bat that early because I've got time' and, yes, you do have time when the ball's coming at 90 kilometres an hour. But we're trying to produce international cricketers and we want to not only produce Black Caps but guys that can average 50 when they get there," said Morgan.

Right now those hopes are pinned on Henry Walsh. Not only because the 19-year-old's arguably the cleanest hitter of a ball in town, but because he's largely free of the coaching that can stymie emerging careers.

Walsh's free and full swing of the bat is exactly what Siddons preaches, so he's been left to play that way.

"I'm a little bit bigger than the average guy, so I've got that extra power and I've always hit straight and always looked to hit big. It's just my natural game," Walsh said.

Morgan believes Walsh is the prototype of the next generation of Wellington cricketers and that these methods are not a fad that will disappear when Siddons does.
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Flem274*

Flem274*

123/5
Both teams playing tonight could give the ODI side a run for their money...

Dougeh out for disciplinary reasons? WAC.
 
Hoggy

Hoggy

U19 12th Man
Hi all, am heading to NZ in January and will be in Auckland for the T20 international vs the West Indies. Was wondering how I would go about getting two tickets to this game. Ticketek doesn't seem to be offering them as of yet.
 
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