Have you ever wondered how the best players of spin seem to score off almost every ball that they face?

Players such as AB DeVilliers, Virat Kohli and Hashim Amla rarely face two balls in a row unless they score a boundary. The board keeps ticking over with little or no risk.

This season, I have been conducting an experiment with a new way to measure cricket performance: "Batting Control". I have spent a whole club cricket season tracking and reviewing.

So, is control worth adding to your club and school reviews or is it one piece of data too many? Read on to find out.

2,342 runs at an average of 90.08. Nine hundreds, including a double hundred and 309* in a 40 over match.

Impressed?

These are not the stats of a county cricket batsman. These are the 2016 stats of Cannock Cricket Club's Brian Barnard. He plays limited over cricket at weekends, like thousands of others in England. How the heck did a club player managed to score so many runs?

Recently, Mark Garaway spoke about the power of using constraints in practice to improve your cricket. This article will give you even more ways to use the same principle across batting and bowling.

Sam Lavery is Cricket Professional at Portsmouth Grammar School.

For any young cricketer, it seems a little far fetched to say the basics of the game apply to international heroes as much they do to themselves.

Picture the scene: You are playing a Twenty20 match and it’s the last few overs. The field is set back and the bowler is trying to bowl yorkers. You need to score at nine an over to win.

It’s time to slog.

One of the age-old battles in cricket is in the nets.

The bowler claims one thing (caught!), the batsman claims another (one bounce four!). No one ever knows for sure unless the bowler hits the stumps. It's all good banter, but it does bring up one question; how can you improve your game if you don't know what happened?

Let's look at the problem and come up with some answers.

This is a guest article from Waqas Zafar: video analyst, cricket enthusiast and computer scienctist based in Lahore. Read more of his work by clicking here.

Here's an example of some of the help an analyst can give to cricketers when they have access to the right information.

Ask most people about opening the batting and they will tell you about batsmen who can block. Occasionally you get a big hitter. But, what really makes a good opening batsman?

When a player moves slightly legside and eases the ball over extra cover for four or six it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It looks great.

But it's often messed up through ignorance. So let's put that right.