Imagine you scored 220 of your 50 overs and you now have the opposition 185-8 with 5 overs left.

You’ve bought your openers back on to finish the job, and rudely the last few batsmen are defending like their life depended on it.

You can stick with the strike bowlers and hope the batsmen get bored or the bowlers are fast enough to blast them out.

The game will end in a draw and your hopes of a strong league position fade a little more.

Or you can bring on your more occasional spin bowler.

Cover point is where your best inner ring fielder should always be to a seam bowler, right?

Runs and wickets are limited as a way of seeing how well your team is doing in the field. There is no easy way of seeing where the psychological momentum lies.

At least, there wasn’t until some bright spark in the England setup developed ‘Match Play’

Match Play is used to judge how well a team is performing as a unit in the field without comparison to the opposition or the conditions.

It concerns the mental boosts or falls found during the game and how this affects the confidence of both sides.

Selection as I see it isn’t just selecting your best eleven players.

If you want the team to play to their full potential selection needs to be specific to roles; and that goes beyond just whether you excel with bat or ball.

The best sides are never made up of the best eleven cricketers in the club, but are balanced and split into complimenting formulas.

It’s not just the captain’s responsibility to motivate the side when on the field.

He has lots things to be thinking about during the fielding session, so here are 5 ways you can assist him  by taking the job of head cheerleader.

It is such an obvious place to start, but so many teams don’t do it well.

Many teams have a bit of chat in the field but mostly without meaning.

The captain of any team needs to be seen and heard at all times. Everybody will turn to you for direction and you set the tone of your side.

Most people prefer to captain from slip or mid-off. But for me, there is a better option.

With the traditional approach, both are in direct line of the batsman to assess their technique and view. 

It’s the height of summer in the UK so we are experiencing monsoon conditions. Undaunted by the weather Burners and David discuss all manner of cricket coaching, playing and watching.

We look at the big international series as England challenge India for the Test number 1 spot and try to work out what a bowling “enforcer” really does.

Plus Craig Wright gives us a few tips on how to be a club captain.

And of course we have your questions where we discuss how to stop getting bogged down as a batsman and how to get selected for rep level cricket. 

Everyone agrees that captaining any cricket team is not easy; but how much can a good captain influence the success of a team?

Not much, according to West Indies captain Darren Sammy.

In this interview Sammy calls captaincy “overrated” stating that it’s the team that is important in motivating itself to great things.

How many times has a left arm seamer been picked because they offer “variety”?

In a world dominated by right-arm over medium pace bowlers, the promise of a different angle to batsmen is too tempting for selectors from Test to club level.

So many batsmen find it hard to adapt to the change of angle that the left arm bowler gets more wickets than his identical right arm counterpart.