Bracewell Outlines One-day Bowling Strategy
5 March 2013
John Bracewell says Gloucestershire's bowlers will seek to make better use of yorkers and bouncers in one-day cricket this summer.
The club's Director of Cricket sees both type of delivery as essential to success in limited overs matches and will ensure plenty of practice is put in before the start of the 40-over and T20 competitions.
John told this website: "Our white ball strategy at the moment in terms of bowling is really about ensuring that we execute our yorkers a lot better because I can foresee an earlier time when we will need to go into death mode.
"We also need to execute our bouncers a lot more accurately, which is difficult in this country because the pitches tend to be slow.
"Bowling yorkers is a mind set and the difficulty county bowlers face is switching formats from game to game. It would be much easier if blocks of matches were played in the same format.
"Getting out of a car from a four-day game when a certain length of bowling is required and then having to adjust to what is needed for a one-day fixture is not easy."
John also expects bowlers to try and get the ball under the bat more often in Championship cricket following a rule change for the coming season.
"The yorker is an undervalued ball in four-day cricket, especially as a partnership-breaker," he said. "But I think the reintroduction of the heavy roller to first class cricket will mean that bowlers have to change their length, rather than concentrating on bolwling into the divots that were there because the heavy roller couldn't be employed.
"I'm pleased that change has been made because it makes our game more akin to international cricket. Surely the role of first class cricket in this country is to produce international cricketers.
"The role of the club is to win trophies, but the duty of the administrators is to simulate the way international cricket is played.
"We have bowlers capable of varying their length well, which means we shouldn't be adversely affected by the return of the heavy roller.
"My concern is that we also vary our line. The loss of someone like Jon Lewis to guide our young bowlers on the field was huge and you have to remember that Ian Saxelby is our most experienced seamer at not yet 24 years old."
