miSport recently hosted some of our friends to help support Matthew Hoggard in his benefit year for an evening of entertainment and celebration. Also in attendance was several of his England cricket team-mates both past and present also sporting friends, to help launch his benefit year in style. The Matthew Hoggard Benefit Year is supporting the 'Chance to shine' appeal.

The evening was hosted by Chris Cowdrey and also had guest appearances from Alec Stewart and Martin Bayfield (ex-England rugby) as guest speaker.

photo credit: xgretsch

Today's coaching tip is from guest poster Matt Homes.

Currently I am coaching a lad of county age group standard who you would say is primarily a bowling all rounder. He has good hand/eye co-ordination and general tactical awareness.

Even at his young age he has been through a number of development and county age group courses during winter programmes and therefore would have been drilled technically in many areas of the game.

photo credit: Spoungeworthy

If you wanted to improve your catching I'm betting you would do some catching practice.

One thing you would not do is train each finger individually.

‘Finger training' is a bad idea because you are isolating individual components involved in catching without practicing the skill as a whole. You know already that your brain doesn't work like that: To develop any skill you need to practice that skill.

photo credit: Spoungeworthy

Back in the mists of ancient history (the 1980's) the Soviets were kings of sport. Their state funded athletes became a huge experiment in maximising performance.

This included the development of periodisation: the planning system that most sports follow to this day, cricket included.

At Old Trafford in 1993 Mike Gatting faced Shane Warne's first ball in Ashes cricket. You probably know the rest already.

Despite this ball, Gatting is recognised as one of England's finest modern players of spin. In this article he gives some tips on how he used to do so well. They can be summarised like this: