Fine up wind, not so downwind

Since I was last here I’ve played three T20’s and currently in a four-day Championship match for Leicestershire.

We had a day off after the Lancashire T20 and played Nottingham at Trent Bridge, a ground that I’ve played well at in the past, well the one time I played there I went ok. We got a pasting from Notts, we only scored 120 odd and that’s never enough to defend. It was not a great effort from us; that meant that we would have to win our last two matches to reach the quarter finals.

Home game vs Yorkshire, in what turned out to be Michael Vaughan’s last match, a game that we probably should have lost. We scored 160 batting first and Yorkshire got to roughly 100 without loss; 60 off 10 with 10 wickets in hand. They should have cruised it, and didn’t. We ended up scrapping it out and wining by 11 runs in the end. A really amazing result and that just shows that this is one very silly game at times. The crowd at Grace Road was brilliant, an almost full house, vocal and energetic and they were rewarded with a great win from the jaws of defeat.

It was Durham at home next, a win for either team would put them into the quarters; and it wasn’t going to be our day. We just haven’t been consistent enough throughout the whole team. Jimmy Allenby, throughout the T20’s, has been brilliant, he’s been our stand-out player. No one really came close to replicating what he did. There were moments of brilliance, but not enough to get us through to the next stage. I bowled ok, stats maybe don’t quite tell the whole story. I had a really good day at Liverpool and then the three next games I felt like I bowled well without being great. You need luck sometimes and I didn’t get it. That’s fine, I am happy with what I’ve learnt, my ability to bowl yorkers has got a lot better and the thinking process behind one-day and T20 cricket is a whole lot better than it was before.

Which brings us to this championship match against Derbyshire at Derby. I spent quite a bit of time training with a couple of the Derbyshire lads last summer before I headed to India and then Bangladesh on the Test tour. I had bowled out in the middle and had enjoyed the pitch and was looking forward to a good bowling deck. We lost the toss and were put in on a deck that we were going to bowl first on as well. As a championship team we have not scored enough runs in the first innings, we had a great first day; 348-5 after being put in was a great result. Unfortunately we didn’t kick on to the giddy heights of 500 and were dismissed for 412. I contributed just five of that in a rather poor display from me; really angry with myself in how I got out. I’m better than that; I nicked a shortish ball through to the keeper kind of fending it away from my body; really not good enough.

My chance to get back into red ball-bowling, the different pace of the game, the different altitudes from batters, bowlers, different field positions and working to different plans. I just wish I could have bowled as well on day two as I had felt going into it. I chose to bowl downwind, not a big wind, but still it was there and felt great to have it at my back. It’s probably fair to say that I am not as good a downwind as I am upwind, and it was no different here. I’m trying to get better at other parts of my game that I need to be better at to be a more ‘whole’ player. I bowled both sides of the wicket, my lengths were not bad, just my lines. I did have it swinging nicely, except it was into the two left-hand opener’s pads. Grrrr!

Day three was a better one for me, although again my downwind spell, first up, wasn’t as good as I should be. Dipps came up to me and asked me if I wanted a go up wind, “why not, I can’t be any worse.” Three overs before lunch and I found what I had been looking for; a) some nice rhythm and b) a wicket. It was good to finally have one in the wicket column and go to lunch feeling a bit better about things. At lunch I said to Dipps I wanted to keep going, he had already asked Jimmy Allenby to start up into it. I wanted to keep bowling, do my job and take a couple more wickets. I ended up with six for the innings, all in one spell, with lunch in the middle, into the wind, and did the job I am here to do.

It was a better feeling going home last night with a good bag of wickets but I still have to work on my downwind rhythm and control. Not much chance of play today to finish off this match which was set up for an interesting last days play ...