Yes, if you choose to.  All video includes ‘TV style’ score and sponsor 

With well sharpened pencils and unflinching concentration, the scorer is a cornerstone of cricket. What would we do without them?

Yet these days, a cricket team bent on success needs more than a tidy book.

Top club sides are looking increasingly professional: They have a coach who put them through sessions a couple of times a week. They have agreements with local gyms to handle cricket-specific strength and conditioning programmes. Pre-season training includes weeks of nets and several warm up matches.

Alongside this is the growing trend for analysis to aid with coaching and developing players. The old fashioned scorebook is no longer enough. We now not only want to know what happened, but how it happened.

Was that fifty a technical masterpiece against great bowling are a dirty across the line hacking display?

Did the spinner bowl well but all those drops prevented a five-fer?

How good was the keeper?

It's possible to record all this and much more so you have a total picture and a way to work on things at the training ground.

Record the match

Naturally, you still need to score the game, so add a task for someone to video the game alongside each ball. If your team has a coach, they are ideally placed to do it. But the scorer can also take charge.

Cameras are easy to obtain these days and there are even apps that tie each delivery video so you can easily check back.

The benefits of this simple change are huge.

Let me give you some examples:

• Strike rotation: The scorecard shows you lot of runs in boundaries but also face a lot of dots. This is especially true in the first 20 overs. You set a target of more singles in the first 120 balls.
• Control: Watch back the video to find out how many times those dots were good solid defence compared to playing and missing. For players who play and miss a lot, get into the nets to work on the type of bowling and shots that cause issues.
• Shot average: Batsmen know their averages, but do they know their shot averages? How many runs per wicket do you get with a drive compared to a cut or pull? Can you work on weaker shots or build stronger shots into super-strengths?
• Bowling technique: Does bowling technique change during a spell as the bowler gets tired? If so, does accuracy decline with it? You can find out by watching the video back then helping the bowling improve their fitness levels to reduce the chance of technical breakdown.

Imagine how much more effective you can be with this kind of focused analysis.

A few years ago this would have been impossible. Today it's affordable and simple. However, with clubs and schools still catching on to the power of match analysis, now is the time to get the edge your team needs to iron out problems and improve strengths to make your championship run a realistic aim.

How can you improve on perfection?

The ICC Women’s World Cup Final was a perfect and fitting end to an exceptional tournament.

England and India were the best two sides in the tournament and it was an absolute honour and privilege to be at Lords on Sunday to witness such a fitting end to a fantastic month of cricket

However, one area of the game that can shift significantly is batting against spin. Back foot play against spin in particular.

Harmanpreet Kaur displayed an ideal front foot game in her Player of the Day Semi Final performance against Australia.

Harmanpreet swept, slog swept and used her feet to hit over the top fantastically.

As soon as the ball was up, it was off!

But when the ball is bowled into the pitch or a bowler drops slightly short, the Women’s game has to learn to adapt if it is to continue to drive batting standards forward.

The universal way to play a shorter ball from a spinner in Women’s Cricket based on this World Cup is to step back towards leg stump and cut or back foot drive the ball.

On Sunday, there were 42 separate examples of this in the exceptional final.

From these 42 deliveries, the batters accrued 12 runs. 12 Runs!!!

Heather Knight and Deepti Sharma made some good stops from extra cover yet the back foot drive/cut shot against spin only yielded 12 Runs from 9 scoring deliveries across 42 attempts in Sunday’s final.

The Stats:

• Scoring Ball%: 21.4%
• Runs per Scoring Shot: 1.33
• Strike Rate: 28.6

These statistics are almost identical in the younger age group cricket (U14 to U15) cricket that I have worked in over the past 2 years at school.

The Millfield U15 side this year created similar stats at the start of the year: Too many instances where there were back foot drives and cuts to fielders with insufficient pace on the ball or in the pitch.

So, What’s the answer?

Develop adaptable footwork.

In simplistic terms, the best batters are those with the most amount of effective options to any given ball. If you train only one footwork pattern then you will have limited options available to that short of a length and short ball.

Encourage your players to develop both the step back into Leg stump and step back into Off stump to create different angles and scoring options.

On the evidence of this World Cup, the batters have one option and one option only.

Constraint practice is great for this.

Throw 12 spin balls at a batter with the intention to only be able to hit legside and then another 12 balls with an off side scoring intention.

Most players work this out and start adopting different movement patterns without any direct instruction.

Then, follow up with a discussion to galvanise the learning from the drill and repeat the drill over and over again until both options are mastered.

Pull Hard! Pull First!

To step away from the Women’s game for a second, the best puller of a spinning ball I saw in the Men’s International game was Mike Hussey.

“Mr Cricket” would take a huge step back into Off stump, flex his legs to get his eyes as close to the height of the ball as possible and flat bat the ball to the left hand side of the mid wicket fielder (Mike was a left handed batter).

Brilliant.

I would show all the Women’s World Cup squads this incredibly simple option. With lots of practice, any batter can become as good as Mike and begin to play this hard hit shot option to balls that only miss length by a fraction.

I can envisage the next ICC World Cup being harder for spinners already!

Combining these two footwork patterns and a “Mr Cricket” pull shot would make life very difficult for the spin bowlers and their captains to keep the batters under the cosh.

You can’t defend both square boundaries on both sides of the wicket and with so much spin bowled in Women’s cricket within power play overs, the captain does not always have a full quota of boundary riders at their disposal anyway.

These simple processes, basic drills and lots of practice would have significant impact upon those World Cup Final Stats.

Review:

The Millfield spin stats (back of a length to short) in the last 5 matches of our season read like this:

• 35 balls
• 41 Runs
• Scoring Ball%: 60%
• Runs per Scoring Shot: 1.86
• Strike Rate: 117.1

This transformation came from practicing our footwork patterning in every session (twice a week) for 6 weeks.

That’s got to be a good investment of time, hasn’t it?

So, Womens International Cricket can improve on perfection.

Roll on New Zealand in 2021 and good luck to the spinners!