Bowling a few yorkers at the end of nets is no way to prepare for the stress of death bowling.

The secret of high-class death bowling is not tactics or technique. It's the ability to perform when the score is tight, your heart rate is high and you have been out of the attack for 30 overs.

It's no good being able to hit the blockhole or bowl a mean bouncer in perfect conditions because death bowling is never perfect. It's always messy and tough and requires nerve and nous to combine with skill. You need to be streetwise not book smart.

Of course, this is tough to practice. Here's a few ways.

Put something on it

A simple way to start integrating death skills, mental toughness and tactical awareness is by putting some consequence onto training.

Imagine you are bowling at nets against the player in your team who is best at death batting. Play a game with them where you try and get them out while they try to hit out. make up some rules about what counts as "out". You can set a field.

Then set a consequence. Whoever loses tidies up the nets, or buys the post-training drinks. Or dinner. It doesn't matter too much what it is (although avoid fitness based punishments if you can).

You will be amazed how much "pressure" you feel when there is a real consequence, even if it is something very minor. You just made practice more realistic.

Move your death practice

We tend to work on death bowling either at the end of nets or in a discreet session with no batsmen. This is fine, but we want to combine these skills, so lets put death practice in another place too.

Have a session where you warm up, do some intense cardio work or game that gets you out of breath. Then go straight into nets and call the first 20 minutes a death bowling session. The batsmen have to hit from ball one, the bowler's have to hit their lengths while tired and not ready to bowl.

You will see lower standards of course, but you will also learn how to bowl when tired and having not found any rhythm, just like you do in games sometimes.

Recreate critical game moments

Death moments are one of the great parts of cricket, but so hard to recreate. You can do so directly in two ways.

1. Play short games. Nothing improves your death bowling faster than playing in actual T20 or Last Man Stands matches. The ideal is games where there is less on the outcome so you can focus on developing skills a bit more than performing consistently, but whatever game you can find will work.
2. Middle practice. Play a 10 over middle practice where the batsmen have to score a good death total for your level. The team I coach would set a target of 70 or 80. Keep score accurately and video the game to ramp up the intensity.

Summary: Learn your response

All these tricks are a way of making death skills both tough and realistic.

This is important because how you respond to critical moments dictates how you how perform in them. So, becoming aware of your response and learning to adapt to it is vital to your success.

A bowler who can feel the stress of a win-lose moment, when tired and still execute a precision yorker is a rare creature. With the right training, you can be one of them.