One of the golden rules of cricket advice is to only comment on what you see. Never comment on what you imagine to be happening.

It’s a simple rule, but easy to forget.

The best way to become a better cricketer is to train in an way that is comfortable, but also challenges you to improve.

Is it possible to achieve both these aims at the same time?

Encouraging your team is a good thing. When you see your mate in nets play a nice shot, you shout "shot!" because it's the done thing. But, does this encouragement help?

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.

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.

How good are you at failing?

As a player and a coach, I have endured my fair share of failure. We all do. Failure is central to cricket's core. A bowler fails, a batter succeeds. The batter fails and the fielding side is happy. A duck is the ultimate batting failure. One team succeeds and one team fails.

The best batters in the world succeed once every three to four innings.

That's a 75% failure rate.

With these numbers and experiences in mind, how good are you at failing?

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?

Here's a drill to practice your infield stopping and catching skills, and test them to the limit!

As you know by now, nets are one area where you can improve how you train. How do you do it?