When a side are doing badly it’s inevitable that extra nets are put on.

The logic is clear: If you practice you get better. Practice, as they say, makes perfect.

But if you were designing a way to practice to get better based on what we know about skill development, traditional nets are about as useful as bat with a hole in the middle.

Nets don’t work to get you better because they don’t fill the fundamentals of improving.

This is a guest post by Laurie Ward

Cricket is a simple game complicated by a myriad of variables: physical, technical, emotional, tactical and natural.

Every ball, wicket, match, day, situation, opposition, conditions and personal experience can vary tremendously.

So how can we prepare for something that can be so unpredictable?

Famously, Sir Don Bradman practiced for hours hitting a golf ball with a stump against an uneven wall to develop his incredible hand-eye co-ordination.

Talent: you either got it or you aint. It can't be coached.

Actually, according to research, talent can be developed by good coaching. You just have to know what to do to make it happen.

Think of it this way; how many sportsmen at the top of their game got there by God given talent alone?

Judging by the number of questions we get here at PitchVision Academy, a lot of players and coaches have a cricketing problem they need solving. Everyone has something; a technical flaw in the cover drive, not quick enough bowling, getting gassed with low fitness levels and a hundred other things.

We also know that there is a frustrating gap for most of us.

The coaches and experts with the answers to your problems are expensive or inaccessible, or both.

At least they were.

As a coach, have you ever wondered about the talented player who seems to cruise without putting in the hard yards?

How much better would Player A be, you wonder, if only he had the motivation of the les talented Player B? The frustrating part is that motivation is more complicated that a simply telling Jimmy to buck up his ideas.

When the weather is not so good the indoor net is a saviour to cricketers. The question is: do they do more harm than good?

I would be interested to see an experiment where 2 groups of players were split into those who netted in the winter and those who did not. I suspect at club level the difference in form might be less than we imagine.

According to the ECBCA, the ideal number of people in a net at any one time is 6. I don't know about your club but on a busy practice day where I play we have way more than that jostling for a bowl and a bat.

The simple answer is to incorporate some fitness work into you practices too.

Of course, we want it to be fun as well as beneficial to our game, so how would you structure a session to meet these needs?

The first thing to do is ask yourself the following questions: