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Jack Taylor Blog Part One

18 February 2014

Jack Taylor is determined to make 2014 a season to remember after a nine-month battle to save his hugely promising career.

The 22-year-old Gloucestershire off-spinner suffered a massive setback last May when suspended from bowling by the England and Wales Cricket Board, having twice been reported for an illegal action.

There followed countless hours of remedial work designed to bring Jack’s action in line with ECB requirements. Then, just when he seemed to be reaching his goal, a shoulder injury suffered in a second XI match set him back again.

Earlier this month, Jack successfully came through an ECB test of his action at Loughborough University and had his suspension lifted with immediate effect.

Now, in a two-part blog for this website, he gives supporters a fascinating insight into what he has been through to get his career back on track

Jack writes:

When John Bracewell took me to one side and told me that I had failed the biomechanical analysis of my bowling action it hit me really hard.

I struggled for a few days, not knowing what to do or think. It hurt even more because I felt like I had earned my place as first choice spinner in Gloucestershire’s LV=County Championship side and now that was being taken away from me. I was given a bit of time off sort my head out before the press releases about what had happened came out.

I knew I had some serious work to do to rectify my bowling action and that a lot of hours had to be put in. I had a sit down with John and Richard Dawson to put a plan together of what the next few months were going to look like. John said he was willing to give me a good amount of time to get it right, which I was relieved to hear, and that the club would back me 100 per cent.

As the club’s spin bowling coach, Richard was given total control of how we were going to go about getting my action sorted and I can’t thank him enough for the amount of hours he put in to get me to where I'm at now.

We stripped things back to basics and looked at the likes of Robert Croft and Graeme Swann to see if we could pick up on any traits that I could implement in the rebuilding of my new action.

The first few weeks of drills and trying new things were really tough, as it all felt alien to me and I didn’t feel like I was going anywhere. But slowly as we repeated and repeated the key components we had picked out, I started to get more familiar with it and I was feeling a bit more positive.

As I started to come off of a bound and develop a run-up, I found it hard to bowl at a stump with no batsman. I like the competition of bowling against someone and getting into a battle, but this was something I had to deal with and find a strategy to overcome. Initially this was really tough for me.

During the early stages of rebuilding my action, Daws got in touch with people he had met during his playing career and while he was at university who working in different fields like psychology and biomechanics to see if they had any ideas, strategies or anything they could help contribute to us moving forward with it all.

As it is impossible to tell anything in terms of degrees of elbow extension to the naked eye, we got in touch with the University of Gloucestershire to see if they could help us with replicating something similar to the ECB testing process. They were a fantastic help and we were able to use their high quality biomechanics lab to repeat what I would be faced with when tested at Loughborough.

This meant I was able to test myself in a high-pressure environment. The first couple of times we went up there I found it really tough. It was a hugely daunting experience because there were about 12 cameras surrounding the bowling crease, with people operating different cameras to work out speed of the ball and if the action was repeatable.

It felt like I was part of an experiment because I was made to wear round balls all up my bowling arm and bowl in a silent room with no atmosphere, at nothing but a set of stumps. It was not a pleasant experience and I wouldn't wish it upon anybody. But as I went up there more and more I started to get used to the feel of being under that pressure and create strategies to overcome it.

The second part of Jack’s blog will appear on the website later this week.

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