Coach Sam Lavery moves beyond technical help and into helping you develop players who know how to make good decisions.

It strikes me that our most important cricket asset is the ability to make decisions. While we focus on important areas like developing technique, getting fitter, bowling faster, and having more creativity at the crease; decisions underpin it all.

Decisions come in all shapes of sizes: Should I play it or should I leave it? Should I bowl a slower ball or should I hit the batsman's toes?

From a wider lifestyle angle: Do I want to go the gym? Am I ready for the game? What will help me improve? Is this coach talking rubbish, or could this conversation help me improve as a player?

So how do we improve our players as decision makers?

Cricket decision making

For now lets consider cricket specific decisions: The ones that have an immediate and direct impact on the game as it happens. There are a few obvious ways of exposing players to decisions here:

1. Tell them what they should be doing before they do it, to ensure they never make a mistake.
2. Allow them to have a go and then intervene when they make what you perceive to be a poor decision.
3. Allow them to keep having a go until they get it right themselves.

There are pros and cons to all three.

The first option doesn't promote active thinking. Players aren't forced to engage with the match situation, and so despite maybe being successful they’re unlikely to become better at decision making or build a greater understanding of how to play the game. Inevitably they’ll become dependant on others making decisions, planning and ultimately leading. Short term success, but minimal long term gain.

The second will inevitably be more problematic in the short term. You allow mistakes to happen, but then discuss them soon after to prevent ongoing failure. Here your players are able to relate to the issue as they've been through it as a negative experience, and so they’re likely to have a greater appreciation and understanding of the problem and how it was solved.

The third is more long term approach which may ultimately empower your players the most as they work out a method or thought process themselves. However, can you be sure they will actually ever manage to achieve their goal? In the meantime they could be subjected to failure and disillusion they never recover from.

Adding decision making to training

Of the 3 examples above there could be room for all of them to be employed at different times; think about how you fit each method into your sessions as well as your season.

• Split net time to allow players to review their decisions half way through either with you or their team mates
• Specify fixtures or blocks of games as development games, which allow players to be creative and make mistakes without the worry of the coach or the result bearing over them
• Set up sessions or match scenarios where players have to work to a specific plan, to see how they can take instruction

Sometimes it’s true that immediate intervention - or prior instruction - can be a great help, but try to avoid doing all the thinking yourself. After all, not only could it be a more valuable experience for your players, it could also be a learning experience for you.

Ultimately your players need to be independent, self reliant thinkers. So consider how you balance your stream of information: Less can so often be more.

Sam Lavery is Cricket Professional at Portsmouth Grammar School. You can hear him every week on the PitchVision Academy Cricket Show.