DEAN JONES CRICKET TIPS
Dean Jones played 52 Tests for Australia between 1984 and 1992, scoring 3,631 runs at an average of 46.55, and making 11 centuries. He also played in 164 one-day internationals for Australia between 1984 and 1994, scoring 6,068 runs at an average of 44.61, including seven centuries.
All up, he played 245 first-class matches, scoring 19,188 runs at an average of 51.85, including 55 centuries.
Dean Jones was a pivotal member of some of Australias greatest cricket teams, including the 1987 World Cup-winning team, and the 1989 Ashes-winning team. His 210 in stifling heat at Chennai in 1986 is regarded as one of the best innings ever played, and through the early 1990s he was widely regarded as the best one-day batsman in the world.
He is one of Victorias greatest-ever cricketers, and captained the state. He is currently the coach of Islamabad United in the Pakistan T20 league, and commentates on cricket for Star Sports in India and for Macquarie Radio Network in Australia, and writes for Fairfax in Melbourne and Sydney.
With love to my three girls,
Jane, Gussie, and Phoebe
DEAN JONES CRICKET TIPS
(the things they dont teach you at the Academy)
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN SPOONER
Westland Publications Ltd.
61, II Floor, Silverline Building, Alapakkam Main Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai 600095
93, I Floor, Shamlal Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110002
First e-pub edition: 2017
First published in Australia by Scribe Publications 2016
Text copyright Dean Jones 2016
Illustrations copyright John Spooner 2016
First published in India by Westland Publications Ltd. 2017
All rights reserved
978-93-86224-66-8
Typeset by PrePSol Enterprises Pvt. Ltd.
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person living or dead, events and locales is entirely coincidental.
Due care and diligence has been taken while editing and printing the book. Neither the author, publisher nor the printer of the book hold any responsibility for any mistake that may have crept in inadvertently. Westland Ltd, the publisher and the printers will be free from any liability for damages and losses of any nature arising from or related to the content. All disputes are subject to the jurisdiction of competent courts in Chennai.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
A LIFETIMES WORTH OF ONE PERCENTERS
This book has been quite a few years in the making, when I think about it. And I think about cricket a lot! I love the game. Its been my life, and as much as the game has changed, it stays the same in many ways, too.
I last played for Australia in the 1990s, but 20 years on I am lucky to remain involved in the game as a coach and a media commentator, right at its beating heart.
Islamabad United is my team, and we won the inaugural title of the Pakistan Super League T20 competition in Dubai in February 2016. What a moment that was for all of us! I hope we can repeat that success in 2017 and I get another ice-bucket shower. That is one ice bath that I love to take!
My television work for Star Sports takes me around the world, and allows me to keep in touch with all the great players of the modern game, as well as some of the legends of the recent past. Many of them, I am happy to say, are represented in this book.
The book has been bobbing around in my mind for a few years now. Watching young players, it occurred to me that while there is a huge amount of coaching nowadays, there is actually too much information rolling around in players heads at times. If you look at players from, say, the under-12 level through to international cricket, they would possibly have up to 15 different coaches during that time. Fifteen, through the age levelsto representative cricket, to state or provincial level, and on to national level! And every single one of those coaches would have a different philosophy and would be wanting to do his thing.
Personally, the best three coaches that I had were my father, Barney, who was a fine player at top-level club cricket in Melbourne when I was a boy; Keith Stackpole, the former Australian Test opening batsman; and Bob Simpson, who was coach of Australia when we had our great period in the late 1980s and 1990s. A lot of what they told me was old school. But old school still applies in the game today. If I was playing today, I would hire my own coach and take him everywhere so that I could draw upon him when I needed him, as players do in tennis and golf, for example.
A player has to filter all this information and make his or her own decisions, has to work out which part of what theyre told applies to his or her game. That is a crucial part of becoming a good player. For instance, Chris Rogers, the recent Australian Test opener, came to me a couple of years ago because he had problems with playing spin. Rogers had played most of his cricket in Perth, where the ball bounces trampoline-style and everyone learns to play off the back foot, so playing on dry, turning decks was vastly different for him when he broke into the Aussie team. Graeme Swann, Englands excellent off spinner, gave him nightmares.
Rogers sought my help at a time when he had already made more than 20,000 runs, which shows you how the game evolves and how every player needs to keep finding new ways of dealing with new problems. What I tried to get Chris to do was to believe in what I taught him, then to work it out himselfin other words, to take ownership of his thoughts and his game. In my view, that is the key to coaching: to help the player to help him- or herself.
It is a lot easier when you have played 20 years as a professional, but not so easy if you are starting out. When I look at modern cricketers, I really wonder whether they are being told about the one-percenters, the little tips that can take you from being good to great, or from average to good. That is the premise of this book: an exercise in finding the one-percenters. Because at the very top level of cricket, everyone has major talent, and at that point it becomes about how your brain functions. It is that space between your ears, it is about how well you understand your own game, understand the game itself, and how you work out what you can and cannot do.
The best example of how the little things work is Sachin Tendulkar, the greatest batsman of the modern era and one of the best ever. I watched him closely and studied his statistics, and worked out that he only scored from about 30 per cent of the deliveries that he faced; this tells me, as youre about to see, that defence is a primary weapon in battingalthough it is not what they show on the highlight reels.
Yes, the game has changed, but it is still a contest between bat and ball. The players hit it further than they used to, and the tactics have been tweaked, but it has not changed as much as people think it has. Everything has been tried before, pretty much, when you think about teams going hard early in one-day internationals, which the Sri Lankans did with Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana in the 1990s. Back then, the Australians did well when batting by holding on to their wickets until around the 30th over, and then accelerating, but Pakistan were doing the same to win the World Cup in 1992. Often, you will see what looks like a new method, but the truth is if you delve into the past it will have been tried before.
