Liam Cromar

What is nets?

Practice can mean a whole lot of things

Liam Cromar
27-Apr-2016
Nets is where you are inescapably alone  •  Getty Images

Nets is where you are inescapably alone  •  Getty Images

As philosophical questions go, "What is nets?" perhaps doesn't rank alongside "What is the purpose of life?", "Is there a God?", or "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?" Nonetheless, despite the familiarity of net sessions to virtually every club cricketer, the newcomer's query deserved a fair response. Where could one start? A few possible definitions presented themselves.
Nets is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Indeed, could batting in nets be much further removed from batting in the middle? No fielders; a different bowler every ball; no consequences for aerial shots. For sure, there is great value in being able to bat and bowl outside match constraints - but hidden dangers lurk for the unwary.
Indeed, nets is a great pretender. Indoor net conditions, in particular, frequently bear little resemblance to what the players will encounter a few weeks hence. The true, lightning-quick bounce is ready to trip up any incautious player down the line. Bowlers who have felt like Joel Garner will abruptly discover their back-of-a-length thunderbolts grounded by the soft surface, miserably lifting a matter of inches rather than feet. On the plus side for them, chances are that the batsman will still mistime it, since for the past six weeks he's been crashing every net delivery through cover, timing every shot without the need for the merest hint of finesse. Forget spring being a time of growth: many a batsman has found the width of his bat to miraculously shrink on the seaming tracks of early May.
Nets is a state of mind. Gone is the pressure of a match situation. Your shots exist divorced from the most obvious and quantifiable measure of value: runs. Alone at the end of the net, there is no reason to do anything other than play each ball on its merits. It is cricket in a bubble, the technical aspects temporarily divested of many of the psychological attendants. In other words, it is risk-free cricket. Yet…
Nets is an existential nightmare waiting to happen. The pain of an out-of-form batsman is well documented to be acute but only temporarily visible - one ball is all it takes to consign his misery to the changing rooms. By contrast, in the nets the batsman has nowhere to hide. The floundering batsman may be struggling to lay bat to ball, even suffering the ignominy of multiple net hat-tricks - but each time, the spring-loaded stumps reset themselves cheerfully and the ordeal continues. The feeling of helplessness may be only accentuated if the bowlers are actively trying to help their fellow clubman into some sort of touch - and powerlessly effecting the opposite.
Your shots exist divorced from the most obvious and quantifiable measure of value: runs
On the other hand, with the right frame of mind, nets is the path to enlightenment. There can be, strangely, a weird satisfaction in being thoroughly worked over in the nets, no matter how many times one nicks off, gets smacked on the thumb, or has one's swingbacks set a-jangling. The nets are the place to test oneself, to identify weak areas (which, to be fair, may include "the cricket pitch"), and to remedy them with targeted practice. The opportunity's there.
Focus, though, is where many net sessions fall down. The height of organisation all too often proves to be a simple allocation of batting time, using the formula (total time * lanes) / players = individual time (and this assumes that players adhere to a basic level of "netiquette"). If nobody wanders off after batting without shouldering their share of bowling, batsmen might typically get ten to 15 minutes of batting, against tiring bowlers who often cannot maintain the accuracy needed to truly test the batsmen. This is, of course, where bowling machines can be particularly useful - though for many at lower levels of the game they remain a rare luxury, if available at all.
If any sort of goal is set for the batsman, it's normally a notional target from the last six balls, with each shot being awarded an arbitrary number of runs by the collective bowlers, usually on the basis of how hard the batsman seemed to hit it, with any niceties of placement or timing understandably ignored due to the inherent limitations of nets. How useful and serious it is can be observed by how often the target magically turns into "six off the last ball" (with five a close second). Yet it wouldn't be too hard to vary the goals to render them more testing: a batsman could be set "12 runs behind square", "14 in the V", or "no possible dismissal".
Nets is ultimately a means to an end. Bob Woolmer's Art and Science of Cricket, which contends that "having a net for the sake of having a net is a destructive syndrome", emphasises the importance of having a specific goal. This is likely to be much more useful in the long run than "simply having the bowlers run in and the batsmen play aggressive shots" - a "waste of everyone's time," according to Woolmer. The extent to which the end is kept in mind will largely determine how effective and useful the net session is.
As for the inquiring mind in the introduction: rather than being burdened with the above explanations, the answer he was given was the succinct, if prosaic, "indoor cricket practice". It serves its purpose - much like its subject.

Liam Cromar is a freelance cricket writer based in Herefordshire, UK @LiamCromar