Times have changed.

The diet of T20 cricket played around the world nowadays has its pro’s and con’s in terms of cricket development. It is fantastic at developing hard-hitting, innovative batters and for encouraging younger participants into the game. I get that and it is important that the modern formats of the game keep bringing new players and parents into the game.

However, when I was young, I could not get enough of the longer format games. On my 16th birthday, I recall sitting at the County Ground in Southampton watching the 1989 Australian Touring team taking on Hampshire in a tour game ahead of the fourth Ashes Test match.

Steve Waugh scored 112 in the first innings. He was magnificently simplistic with his batting approach that day. Yet all I actually recall was his swashbuckling back foot drive, his clip off his toes hit just square leg and his straight-drive. It was so simple and so effective. He scored quick enough for his team and yet did this stuff in a steady and repeatable fashion.

These days, we play lots of 50 over cricket at school on Sundays against County age group opposition.

It has been fascinating to watch over the past few weeks. Whoever bats first tends to score at five or six runs per over but they are regularly bowled out with between 60 to 90 balls still left in the innings. This sets average targets but ultimately, on the awesome wickets at school, you will never defend the score unless you bowl the opposition out.

As I keep telling the lads, you can never get enough runs and the most successful players tend to face more balls than the less successful ones.

These are basics of the game and have to be applied otherwise, you will always come up short in terms of runs, wickets and therefore, you will come up short in the outcome stakes too.

Back to Tugga Waugh...

The Self-awareness secret to Steve Waugh’s success

During the Ashes series is 1989, Waugh scored 393 runs before England could take his wicket. By this time, Australia were two-nil up on their way to an eventual four-nil drubbing of their English counterparts.

Waugh effectively had three or four shots and limited himself to those for most of his Test career.

He scored just shy of 11000 runs at an average of 51 with a game centred on his three most effective and fundamental batting shots.

If you ask a young player to name his shots nowadays then they will list about 8 different options.

Which ones is their best shot?

What attacking shots average over 50 and which ones average under 20?

Can our young players be as self-aware as Steve Waugh when it comes to their 3 most effective shots?

Many of my conversations with young players presently centre on them naming their 3 most effective shots.

Do they know their scoring shots in rank order in terms of Average and Runs per Scoring Shot (RSS)?

If they did have this awareness, would they have more clarity when it came to deploying their attacking options within centre wicket practice and match play?

Well, it certainly would not do any harm in my book.

So if you have a batting team or an individual who is underplaying their hand when it comes to time in the middle and therefore, their ability to score runs then can they follow Steve Waugh’s self-awareness example.