Good weather, a dozen players and lots of positive, player-led activity in this session.
I again asked a player to lead the warm up, and will continue to do this with the overarching aim that players turn up and just start warming up themselves. This is an area of self-reliance that should be easy to bring about as soon as we change the culture.
We then had a fielding completion, where two teams took turns to execute pick up and throws and a catch with the best set winning each round. It was a 5-2 landslide to Team A.
I wasn't planning on using the wet square, but a senior bowler wanted to bowl through to test an injured leg. He, along with other senior players, impressed on me the need for outdoor training, so we got out the net and ran it for two hours. This is exactly the kind of player-led training I am after: People telling me what they want and me facilitating it.
Once the net was running, all I had to do was keep people focused on the tasks. I challenged batsmen in different ways to avoid the "have a hit" mentality, I made sure people were getting throw downs and I asked bowlers to focus on specific things rather than "turning the arm over".
However, these were minor things as most of the time people were focusing on getting productive work done.
This freed me up to find time to do some range hitting with a batsman, some technical drills with a young player and some keeping work with the first team keeper.
I also brought everyone together at the end to summarise the session, which acted as a way to remind people that the onus is on them to do the work rather than look to me to tell them what to do. I reminded them I will always be available for drills, analysis and conversation around their game, but the rest is up to them. This was a nice little bookmark and I'll keep doing it as long as I can find something to say.
- The good: self-led session, everyone focused.
- Needs work: I'll need to butter up the groundsman after ruining a pitch!