Park cricketer
Club Legend
- Nov 29, 2018
- 1,771
- 2,367
- AFL Club
- Adelaide
None of the factors mentioned in the OP seem to be a serious issue.
1. The first thing that's important is the participation of young kids in the sport, because you need raw material to work with. If I'm a young kid growing up in Australia, what is the sport that will capture my imagination first. In India, there's a mad passion about cricket. But even there, now a sporting culture is starting to develop and more and more young kids are turning to football, badminton, etc. So I can imagine how difficult it must be for cricket to grapple for attention in Australia competing with other sports like the AFL, rugby, soccer, basketball, etc.
This in turn is dependent on the visibility of the game at grassroot levels, if the game is promoted well in media, is the coverage available to all the people, etc. It must be promoted in a way that every kid growing up must dream about representing the country in that particular sport one day.
2. It's fine having good participation but the numbers are not the be all and end all of everything. If it was so, we would have won multiple world cups in football by now with our 1.2B population and small european countries wouldn't be dominating football. Raw talent is not something that's limited to a particular region or country but is ubiquitous throughout the world. Irrespective of the population, a robust developmental system is enough to ensure the production of top quality players in any sport. La masia was the secret behind Barcelona's success in football, many of Mumbai's stalwarts were shaped in the bustling maidans of Mumbai.
In any sport, be it football or cricket, how good a player becomes is determined in his formative years (10-18 years). The junior levels is by far the most important period in a cricketer's life and any bad habits accrued over this period will be very very hard to rectify after he becomes a pro. It's somewhat easy to achieve good habits but extremely difficult to let go off bad habits. So it's vital that kids in these levels are not influenced by the fancy shots that you find galore in the short formats, it's difficult because every kid would love to belt a bowler to the cow corner for a six and driving the ball back past the bowler with a high elbow and a straight bat probably won't be as appealing to say the least. But take the example of the quintessential test batsman in world cricket right now, Che Pujara. Apparently his father, who was a first class cricketer himself, was repulsed whenever he saw young kids playing with tennis balls hitting them in the air. He actually took young Pujara to a separate corner of the ground and kept rolling a cricket ball along the ground and asked him to drive it back with a straight bat. He apparently didn't feed him a single ball that was pitched for a long time so that he doesn't develop bad habits along the way.
https://indianexpress.com/article/sports/cricket/i-saw-the-making-of-cheteshwar-pujara-5535781/
A very good read about the development of Pujara over the years.
So yeah, the formative years is the period that determines how good a player is going to be and you can do very little changes to the technique after one becomes a pro because if one grows up playing with a loose technique, no matter how hard he tries to get his hands and feet moving, subconsciously his hands will be drawn away from the body/feet won't cone to the pitch of the ball and things like that because that's etched in memory and very hard to lose habits developed in formative years. So the quality of the junior coaches, the infrastructure available for the kids and whether the competition is high enough and things like that are much more serious factors.
1. The first thing that's important is the participation of young kids in the sport, because you need raw material to work with. If I'm a young kid growing up in Australia, what is the sport that will capture my imagination first. In India, there's a mad passion about cricket. But even there, now a sporting culture is starting to develop and more and more young kids are turning to football, badminton, etc. So I can imagine how difficult it must be for cricket to grapple for attention in Australia competing with other sports like the AFL, rugby, soccer, basketball, etc.
This in turn is dependent on the visibility of the game at grassroot levels, if the game is promoted well in media, is the coverage available to all the people, etc. It must be promoted in a way that every kid growing up must dream about representing the country in that particular sport one day.
2. It's fine having good participation but the numbers are not the be all and end all of everything. If it was so, we would have won multiple world cups in football by now with our 1.2B population and small european countries wouldn't be dominating football. Raw talent is not something that's limited to a particular region or country but is ubiquitous throughout the world. Irrespective of the population, a robust developmental system is enough to ensure the production of top quality players in any sport. La masia was the secret behind Barcelona's success in football, many of Mumbai's stalwarts were shaped in the bustling maidans of Mumbai.
In any sport, be it football or cricket, how good a player becomes is determined in his formative years (10-18 years). The junior levels is by far the most important period in a cricketer's life and any bad habits accrued over this period will be very very hard to rectify after he becomes a pro. It's somewhat easy to achieve good habits but extremely difficult to let go off bad habits. So it's vital that kids in these levels are not influenced by the fancy shots that you find galore in the short formats, it's difficult because every kid would love to belt a bowler to the cow corner for a six and driving the ball back past the bowler with a high elbow and a straight bat probably won't be as appealing to say the least. But take the example of the quintessential test batsman in world cricket right now, Che Pujara. Apparently his father, who was a first class cricketer himself, was repulsed whenever he saw young kids playing with tennis balls hitting them in the air. He actually took young Pujara to a separate corner of the ground and kept rolling a cricket ball along the ground and asked him to drive it back with a straight bat. He apparently didn't feed him a single ball that was pitched for a long time so that he doesn't develop bad habits along the way.
https://indianexpress.com/article/sports/cricket/i-saw-the-making-of-cheteshwar-pujara-5535781/
A very good read about the development of Pujara over the years.
So yeah, the formative years is the period that determines how good a player is going to be and you can do very little changes to the technique after one becomes a pro because if one grows up playing with a loose technique, no matter how hard he tries to get his hands and feet moving, subconsciously his hands will be drawn away from the body/feet won't cone to the pitch of the ball and things like that because that's etched in memory and very hard to lose habits developed in formative years. So the quality of the junior coaches, the infrastructure available for the kids and whether the competition is high enough and things like that are much more serious factors.
