Seeing a cricket doctor for your batting illness

I have a sense of déjà vu this season. Again and again, I keep getting out. Bowled, early on in my innings, when the ball is pitched up. I swear the same delivery last year was dispatched over the boundary rope. This summer it's shattering the bails.

What's gone wrong?

I can't blame my bat, it's great piece of willow. I've definitely been unlucky, though, at least once, as I was run out backing up when the bowler feathered a straight drive off his fingertips into the stumps. But that was once.

Some batsmen like to blame the umpire for a run of barren form, and I wish I could. Except for the game where I was triggered lbw sweeping an offspinner - the bowler came up to me after the match and said, "I was a bit surprised by that decision" - the officials have been flawless. And the fact is, if I'd been in form in the first place, I'd have connected with that leg-side full toss.

Early in the season I tried blaming the pudding wickets, the soft tracks prepared by that Great British groundsman, the wet weather. Soon after I trudged back to the pavilion muttering about the ball not coming on, the next batsman hit a hundred.

There is occasional solace when dismissed by a genuine jaffa, and there was certainly that one ball that pitched outside leg and nipped the off bail. "That would've got Joe Root out," chirped the umpire. And Joe Root would have got a double-hundred in the next match, in which I was yorked by a slow outswinger, on a perfect deck.

So what's the solution? Is it a mental problem? Two of my team-mates sought the advice of a bona fide sports psychologist before the season had even started, and both claim the powers conveyed in their counselling sessions have made them better players. The problem is that I studied psychology at university. I know the tricks of the trade. It would be like a magician going to watch a magic show.

If my form were a stalling car, I'd take it to a mechanic. If my knee was smarting, I'd see a physiotherapist. Therefore the cricket equivalent is the coach.

Enter Tom Flowers, not only the current leading run scorer of the Leicestershire Premier Division but also the national assistant coach to the England Learning Disability squad. I first met Tom when he was a toddler watching his dad and I play nearly 25 years ago, and I again bumped into him this winter leading my old club's pre-season training.

I gave him a call, reminded him that I once bowled at him as a kid, and then booked a net. Although I grew up with intensive one-to-one coaching, from the woodwork teacher at my comprehensive school telling us to hold the bat like an axe, and from the willing players of Leicestershire CCC when they came out on club visits, I hadn't had specialist intervention for years.

From the moment I put on the pads and started hitting back Tom's throwdowns, I was under scrutiny. Instead of a doctor examining my chest with a tap of the stethoscope, Tom was diagnosing my batting illness with each ball that passed my outside edge or drilled into my pads.

Unlike the pro player, who has his technique magnified by HD cameras and scything pundits, the average club hacker has guesswork and team-mate gossip. I knew Tom had made the right prognosis when, without seeing me get out this season, he mimicked how I usually end up being skittled - falling over with my head lopped to one side.

"Head, hands, feet," he told me, and then showed me. Like a nervous tic, I had developed an odd trigger movement. A short step with my front foot before the ball had even been bowled, as Tom demonstrated by feigning to throw and watching me shuffle forward when the ball was still 22 yards away.

In a single season I had worked this faux dance step into my stance. From where? Through injury and age, our bodies change. We develop habits that we don't notice. Jonathan Trott began playing in front of his pad, part of a problem he developed in moving too early to play the ball. "There is a big difference with having it in your head to get forward," as Geoff Boycott noted when Trott was in the West Indies in 2015, "and moving forward before the bowler actually lets go of the ball."

I might not be fending off bouncers in Port Elizabeth or Perth, but my twitchy feet mean I'm unbalanced when actually hitting - if lucky - the cherry. After a few drills to retrain my impetuous step, I asked Tom how hard it was to blend this technique tweak into my natural game.

"Look at Jonny Bairstow," Tom instantly replied. "What a transformation."

Shortly after Bairstow made his Test debut in 2012, he was dropped. Worse than that, there was the sense he'd been "found out" by quick bowling. His technique simply wasn't sound enough for international cricket. So he went away, changed his stance, hands, and backlift. He broke down everything from chest position to how low he crouched. And wow, has it worked. Bairstow has gone from a failing prospect to a regular star. On his technique rehaul, Bairstow says, "If I don't keep improving and evolving my game, it's not going to work."

Inspiration, surely, for this amateur clubber to stop twitching that front foot and to get his head in line. I shall find out if the tweak turns into runs soon.