You want to bowl fast, so you change your action to correct flaws and you get more pace. Easy, right?

Wrong.

Frustration: An underrated way to get wickets, and enormously effective at any level. In recent years, this has been called “squeezing” or “bowling dry”.

How do you bowl dry this way?

International players and coached these days are always going on about how they “performed as a unit” – fielded, batted, bowled.

Lurking in the depths of this moribund press talk is a grain of truth we can use at any level.

David Hinchliffe, Mark Garaway and Sam Lavery talk cricket. There is a discussion on the coach-captain split of duty, front foot stride and whether you need to join an academy to be a cricketer.

As a fielding coach, I would get so excited when some of the players take their practice on the training ground into match play.

Fielding, especially for young players, is the ugly sister of playing cricket.

Fielding in the deep can feel like a lonely place.

Have you ever thought about the many different ways that a person can move and position themselves ahead of taking a safe catch?

I was taught one way of high catching when I was a young player: The "Aussie" style catch with the hands reversed and the ball taken as high as possible with my hands in front of my face.

The team get together to talk cricket coaching. The topics are tactics vs skills, starting to play and hitting the ball on the ground.

Listen for the details.

The ability to manipulate the ball against top class spinners is one of the key differentiators between good and great batters at the highest level.