James Nixon - ARTICLES

Fielding in today’s game has become a separate skill alongside batting and bowling. This wasn’t the case twenty years ago, it was just thought of as “something you did when you weren’t bowling or batting”. However nowadays, especially in one-day cricket, good fieldsmen have a distinct advantage over those less skilled. So if you want […]

You might have the best knowledge of technique in the world, an excellent eye for details and an encyclopaedic memory of every man to play Test cricket for your country, but none of this will automatically make you a good coach. Of course, you need an understanding of, and love for, the game – but, […]

Cricket is quite possibly unique in the sheer number and diversity of tactical possibilities that lie within the game. Whilst there is nothing as blatant as the differences between a 5-4-1 and 3-4-3 formation in football, the subtleties and nuances are worthy of their own book – and many have been published, the most famous […]

Spin bowling worldwide has enjoyed a revival, both in its effectiveness and popularity, during the last ten years, with the success of high-profile bowlers such as Shane Warne, Muttiah Muralitharan and Anil Kumble – who have over 1,500 Test wickets between them – a key factor in its growth. Spin bowlers can be classified into […]

If a bowler sends down the same sort of delivery every time that he runs in to bowl, the batsman can often get used to this and as a result find the bowling much easier to play. As a result of this, it’s useful for a quick bowler to develop a ‘variation’ in order to […]

Once you’ve cracked getting the ball down to the other end of the pitch, it’s time to start thinking about whether you can extract any movement from the ball on its way down – after all, it’s much easier for a batsman to hit a ball that goes in a straight line than one that […]

There are few more thrilling sights on a cricket field than seeing stumps cartwheel out of the ground following a quick man breaking through the guardian’s defences. Bowlers like Brett Lee, Shoaib Akhtar, Shane Bond and Steve Harmison regularly break through the 90mph (145kph) barrier, but outright speed isn’t the only way to remove a […]

In the simplest possible terms, bowling is about getting the ball from one end of a 22-yard pitched wicket to another, with the restriction that your arm stays straight in the rotation leading up to its release. This isn’t the place to enter into debates of the technicalities of the throwing laws; but at lower […]

At the other end of the wicket from the wielder of the willow, the bowler is the man charged with using his skill, power and wit to dismiss the batsman. Bowlers can roughly be divided into five types; seam bowlers, outswing bowlers, inswing bowlers, finger spinners and wrist spinners. There’s one golden rule that has […]