Fielding & keeping
Nobody admires a plain white wall. The moment a muddy ball splashes across it, everybody notices. That is the job. You are trying to stay a wall.
Ten fielders, one keeper, and a captain deciding which gaps they are willing to live with.
Expect it every single ball
A batter stands between you and the ball, so you never know if it is coming. That means you have to imagine it is coming every time, so hard that you are surprised when it does not.
A fielding clip worth copying the body position from.
on fieldingThen switch off, properly
Between balls, let go. Look at the trees. Concentration is a bar that only refills when you are not using it, and a four hour day will empty it if you leave it running.
Catches change everything
You might get one chance all day, and it might be the whole match. A hundred clean takes count for nothing next to the one you put down, which is unfair, and is also the job.
Walk in with the bowler
Every ball, from every position. You arrive moving forward instead of flat footed, which is worth about two metres of range and turns a lot of ones into dots.
When you have been out there four hours in the heat, taken no catches, and you are still switched on for every delivery, you have become the wall.
Running between the wickets
The cheapest runs in cricket, and the ones most junior teams give away for nothing. None of it requires talent, which is exactly why it is worth doing properly.
Turn with the bat in the hand on the side you are turning towards, so you finish the turn already looking at the ball. Call loudly and call early: yes, no, or wait, and nothing else.
Back up, every ball
Leave the crease as the bowler releases, not after. Then tell your partner to do the same, every over, until neither of you has to think about it.
Three words, loudly
Yes, no, or wait. Nothing else, and say it early. The striker calls in front of the wicket, the non striker calls behind it, because that is who can see.
Run the first one hard
Always. A hard first run turns a lot of singles into twos, and it puts the fielding side under pressure without you taking any risk at all.
Turn the right way
Bat in the hand on the side you are turning towards, so you finish the turn already looking at the ball. Slide the bat in along the ground rather than reaching at it.
Agree it before you walk out
Two minutes at the gate. Who calls what, whether you are running the first one hard, and what happens if it goes behind square. Almost every run out is two people who had quietly decided different things and left it too late to say either of them out loud.
Wicket keeping
A keeper touches the ball more than anyone on the field and gets noticed only when it goes wrong. The skill is almost entirely about attention, and attention is trainable.
Standing up is the single most useful thing a young keeper can learn, and the scariest. It pins the batter in the crease, which is worth more over an innings than any catch you take.
Be a pristine wall
Nobody notices a clean white wall until somebody splashes mud on it. Taking a hundred in a row means nothing next to the one you drop, and you have to make peace with that before you put the gloves on.
Watch it into the gloves
Same rule as batting. Not to where you think it will be, all the way in. Give with the hands as it arrives rather than snatching at it.
Rise with the ball
Start low, come up as it comes up. A keeper who stands up too early has to come back down, and that is where byes come from.
You are the loudest person on the field
You can see everything: the batter's feet, the shape of the field, whether the bowler is tiring. Nobody else has that view, so say what you see.
Captaincy
Captaincy is mostly a thinking job, and the thinking is not complicated. It is about staying a step ahead of the batter and keeping ten other people switched on while you do it.
Be aggressive, and mean it
It is a mind game. A field that is set to save runs tells the batter they only have to wait. A field set to take a wicket makes them do something.
Set the field for the ball you are about to bowl
Talk to the bowler first, agree the plan, then move the fielders to match it. A field that does not match the plan is just decoration.
Trust people from the first day
Ricky Ponting told every group he joined the same thing: you do not have to earn my trust, you have it. Be yourself, play your way. Then he worked on making them feel good about themselves every single day.
Be creative when it is drifting
When nothing is happening, change something. A different angle, a different end, a fielder somewhere odd. Doing nothing while a partnership builds is the one genuine captaincy mistake.
You should be so immersed that you are surprised when the ball does not come to you, not when it does. on keeping, from the notes
How a team actually wins
Most of what gets said in a huddle is about effort. The numbers say games are decided by three things, and none of them is effort.
The first is dot balls. In professional T20, sides that bowl forty or more dots in an innings win more than sixty five per cent of the time no matter how many runs they concede. Not economy, not wickets: balls the batter did nothing with. The second is wickets early. Three in the first six overs is worth about a two thirds win rate on its own. The third is the trade a batter makes every ball, and it is worth knowing the size of it. Professional batters go for a boundary on about a quarter of balls, come off a bit over a third of those times, and roughly quadruple their chance of getting out in the process. They do it because the runs go up two and a bit times. That is a good trade, and it is still a trade.
The same thing at the other end of the game: the best Test sides are defined by taking twenty wickets rather than by scoring. India under Virat Kohli bowled the opposition out twice in sixty nine per cent of their Tests, the highest rate anybody has managed.
Dots are the pressure
A ball the batter does nothing with is worth more than it looks, because it is the one that makes him do something silly two balls later. Professional sides that bowl forty dots in a T20 innings win about two thirds of the time regardless of the runs they give away.
Early wickets are worth more than late ones
Three wickets in the first six overs of a professional T20 is worth about a sixty seven per cent chance of winning the match, all on its own. The start is not a settling in period for the fielding side. It is the part that decides it.
A boundary attempt is a trade
Professional batters go for the boundary on about a quarter of the balls they face and pull it off a bit more than a third of those times. Going for it roughly quadruples the chance of getting out, and it more than doubles the runs. Worth doing, and worth knowing you are doing it.
Twenty wickets, not four hundred runs
The best Test side of the last twenty years is measured by how often it bowled the other lot out twice. India under Kohli managed it in sixty nine per cent of their Tests. You cannot win a game you cannot finish, and a side that thinks of itself as a batting side usually cannot.
Somebody has to say it out loud
Four balls in a row through the same gap is not bad luck, it is a fielder in the wrong place, and it goes on until somebody says so. Every ball a fielder is part of has a value now, including the run he saved and the one he did not, and the cheapest runs on the field are the ones nobody mentioned.