I have known, worked with and admired Graeme Smith for many years. Over the years he taught me some valuable coaching lessons.

I first met "Biff" when he was a 18 year old lad straight out of school. He played some club cricket in the UK and was in my Hampshire Board XI for a few games. I was impressed with his maturity and sense of fun; less impressed with his "grubby" technique.

The key lessons that I learnt from the great man are:

I'm working this week with an incredible tutor group on the ECB Level IV Batting module at the National Cricket Performance Centre. Matthew Maynard, Tony Middleton (the Hampshire CCC Batting coach) and myself are heading up the course.

Have you ever said to a batter "you have 6 balls left!", then they change their mode and just slog?

The damage that this does is immeasurable.

Any progress from the session is diluted or reduced. The batting shapes and thought processes evaporate.

Arguments ensue about whether it was 4, 6 or caught at deep mid on

The batter starts the next opportunity to bat with this poor experience running through their veins.

It's one of my biggest bug bears, and for years I have been trying to figure out a way around this.

How many times have we walked back to the pavilion asking "what on earth happened there?"

I know I have on numerous occasions.

As you read last week, England and Somerset batsman Nick Compton popped in to run a Batting Masterclass at Millfield School.

This week, we had a batting masterclass from Somerset and England's Nick Compton.

Nick is someone who I have watched and admired for a number of years and a few weeks back he agreed to come in and work with our cricketers. His story reminded me of the session that we did with Kevin Pietersen. Their batting style of play may be different, yet their approaches to challenge, their drive, their hard work, honesty and willingness to share information with others was identical.

Here is what we learned from that masterclass.

Last week I talked about the missing two thirds of batting and focused on helping batters pick up visual cues. The next phase of the batting process is to build up our decision making capacity.

One of the ways that works for me is to build up the number of resources available to the individual: That is to say which options can be used.

I then to test which ones are most effective in a variety of scenarios and match conditions. This way, the player starts to decide for themselves.

I ran a session based on this today around playing spin using the Merlyn spin bowling machine variation mode which subtly shifts lengths by 10% either way.

The session went a little bit like this:

We coaches are generally very good at developing one part of batting:'shot execution'. That is the mechanics of each shot. But this is the last phase in a series of three.

Before you can play a shot you need to pick up the visual cues and decide on the shot. These are the missing phases for many of us.

So how do we go about developing the first two phases?

James Faulkner turned certain loss into monumental victory in the 2nd ODI against England in 2014. He was brilliant but - it has to be said - England were poor in the last gasps of that game.

One TV expert commented in review that "Surely England can’t be practising their yorkers." An easy assumption to make based on the outcome of the game.

However, the bottom line is that all International teams do practice bowling yorkers a lot. So, why couldn't England land them?

You might be surprised to learn that I'm not a big reader of books. Yet, occasionally, I come across a book that flows when I read it and has big enough font that even a fool like myself can keep pace and not make too many mistakes when reading in my head.

Robin Sharma has a wonderful book called The Greatness Guide in which he scribes a series of 2 page lessons that he has learnt from his life in business and now in his highly successful personal development coaching business.

One of the books lessons is;

Last week, I wrote an article which led to significant debate on the site. This is brilliant, exactly what we are looking for.

The drill that I wrote about was an option to use when you’re faced with a fast bowler who sweeps the back leg under the line of their body going into Back Foot Contact (BFC). Pitchvision Academy fast bowling coach, Ian Pont gave some views and opinions in the comments section and offered another set of drills that can help bowlers to deal with the same technical challenge.