With Canada in Africa for a critical tournament, and Cricket Canada electing a new board, Eddie Norfolk provides some video from a 2016 HP camp, and some musings on video analysis and good governance.
A short video of some of the net action during the first of three Cricket Canada High Performance (HP) Academy indoor camps held in Toronto in the spring of 2016 about one week before Cricket Canada’s Annual General Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. A few of the people who attended that AGM will have seen an excerpt of two on my laptop.
Someone in Toronto asked me if I was “going to Vancouver next weekend” during the Toronto camps, which was how I first “discovered” that Cricket Canada Annual General Meeting. There was at least one dissenting voice in Toronto about the value of video of such indoor net activity. I thought that if someone had obtained a copy of the video analysis software where each ball can be flagged to indicate the batter and bowler it could have been useful for creating folders showing how batters and bowlers performed against each other.
I decided to fly to Vancouver, leaving early on Saturday morning, and enjoyed looking out the window during the journey. I was a bit tired in the afternoon so it was probably a reasonable coincidence that I did not stumble upon the public session of the Cricket Canada AGM on the Saturday afternoon.
My views on what could and should be being done to assist coaching and playing, as well as making the game known via videos that included recognition of whatever sponsors were supporting the game at the particular event level (national, provincial, league or specific tournament) would likely have been well beyond what various board members (from different levels of cricket in Canada) would wish to hear; especially as I would have placed the onus on those elected people to become active in spending some money on capital items (e.g. cameras, tripods and/or mounting positions above sightscreens) and operating needs such as camera cards….and even readily available sources of power, sponsors and cricket organization signs around the ground plus scores on scoreboards.
Former West Indies star opening batsman Desmond Haynes was interested in seeing video of the Final of the second Desmond Haynes Cup Final. A copy of the basic video, I believe, will have found a way to him but some scoring updates and names of bowlers, batters and fielders would greatly improve the original content.
But that basic footage meets what is, sadly, the traditional Canadian cricketing league standard that if you can recognize yourself or your friends in the video then that’s good enough. A sentiment that is not good enough in my opinion, but what would I know? Except someone was interested in some of my thoughts two or three weeks ago when I spotted that someone’s backfoot and balance were not so good – the batter was limited in his range of shots and would struggle against better bowlers. He was batting against a bowling machine. Also on artificial wickets it may not be as easy to know your position relative to the position of the stumps as on a natural grass wicket.
Now in May 2017 there is a Cricket Canada AGM in Toronto at which there will be re-elections for positions where some people were elected to the Cricket Canada board in elections that took place a few weeks after that Vancouver AGM. Good governance and proper event and development planning remains a key issue and is an issue that needs to extend into the grassroots leagues and provinces in order to address various deficiencies and weaknesses at the national level in Canadian cricket in my opinion.
Surely someone from the host province might have worked out that it would be possible to create the opportunity for pictures of the Under-17 players selected for the Canadian national junior squad to be taken, if for just a brief moment or minute during the closing presentations of the 2016 Canada Cup? A version with the players wearing their provincial shirts would have been useful and much better than nothing if it would take too much time to match national team shirts to players. A thought for another day, or do I mean another era when the parents are not invited to find sponsors for a province or league (as they were during one event in the last couple of years). At least the parents were thanked for helping prop up the game during the closing phase of the 2016 Desmond Haynes tournament.
Some management attitudes within corporations can include the “what could you do to make me (the manager) look good (if not great or excellent) today? Some memories fade in a moment or the twinkling of an eye. Some memories last much longer on the part of some but not necessarily all.
Playing cricket, like baseball, there are needs for long-term memory but short-term forgetting or letting go of the memory last ball or pitch when batting is needed. Continued worry about a badly played shot (if you are not out) or dwelling on what a great boundary I just hit can lead to mental and playing errors and you’re out !
Similar thinking and forgetting is needed on the part of the bowler or pitcher. The last ball is history, focus on doing well – building – with the next ball, whether building runs, dot balls or dismissals/outs.
Eddie Norfolk
May 13, 2017, Toronto