As I headed out on the regular lap around town this morning I realised that I must have known there was going to be a significant rain delay as I set about putting a batch of a regular kitchen staple together.
Someone, I thought, might take yesterday’s comments about the haka and Jerusalem as evidence of significant anti-Kiwi or anti-Pom sentiment in these parts. While I’ll accept there’s a bit of that in these parts it’s not what fuels a rather intense dislike of manipulating things to someone’s advantage by disrupting the opposition’s preferred pre-match preparation.
As a result I spent a fair portion of the time I spent waiting for the start of play musing on a particularly irritating piece of time wasting that may well have cost me a chance of coaching the winning side at the 1996 Queensland Primary Schools’ state carnival and going on from there to ponder some things you’d possibly be looking to adapt if you were coaching a side at international level.
Those musings and ponderations continued through the morning walk, and form the basis of what follows here.
But, first, the background.
Primary School Cricket, back when I was involved (it may have changed in the interim, it’s been a good sixteen years since the events under consideration) might have been played in a fifty over format, but games were cut into two hour sessions. Two hours, lunch, two hours, afternoon tea, then however long you needed to wind things up.
It was also played in an environment where there were definite protocols in place when it came to coaching on the field. Two years before this particular chain of events I’d been chatted, for instance, for telling the twelfth man to take these batting gloves out to the captain, who was batting at a snail’s pace in pursuit of a difficult target, and tell him to get runs or get out.
It was the third time this particular message had been delivered, and a degree of frustration may have had something to do with the fact that everyone nearby was aware of the specific instructions.
But, as The Astute Reader may gather, in this environment there are limited avenues through which instructions can be communicated to the batsmen in the middle. You had slightly more latitude when your team was fielding, but these things were watched and obvious offenders chatted.
In any case, with two hour sessions and limited avenues of communication there’s a definite advantage in maximising the number of overs you bowl in the first session, particularly if you can keep things tight and restrict the run rate.
That means the opposing coach will have fewer overs to work with when he sets out with modified instructions after the lunch break, if you catch my drift.