For the coach

All high level cricket coaches can face one major problem in their career: shoulder injury. Thousands of throw downs - hurled faster and faster as you progress up the grades - can wreak havoc to the shoulder, upper arm and elbow. At the end of the 2009 English summer, four coaches from the England setup were sidelined due to shoulder injury. Using the Sidearm™ removes a huge proportion of the strain on this joint. A swing of the arm, a flick of the wrist and the ball is propelled at anything up to 65mph. Practice can therefore be longer, be sustained at a better level and involve throwing more balls per minute than with throw downs.

Put some shoulder and body action into the throw - say 50% of what would be put into a full pace throw down - and the ball can reach speeds of up to 80mph, enough to test the highest quality of batsman. Add to that the bounce, swing and seam that can be generated by the Sidearm™ , and you’ve got a practice session to better anything available by other methods.

On watching level 2 and 3 coaches at my indoor cricket centre, it seemed to me they faced one fundamental problem. While they could teach a player a certain shot and practice it with bowling machine or throw downs, they couldn’t see if he or she would then play that shot well when they didn’t know it was coming. Often they would resort to bowling at the player, but then the batter would only face about 3 balls a minute, and one or two of them could well be off target.

With Sidearm™ , the batter can face up to 12 balls a minute, with 8-10 of these being right in the position the coach wants. If the coach feels the player is starting to pre-meditate the shot, he can easily change the line and length to keep the player honest.