Catching Practice
Practising your catching is a fantastic way of improving your hand/eye co-ordination and will help improve the rest of your game.
Try throwing a tennis ball against a wall from varying distances. If you can catch it easily with both hands, see if you can repeat the success using one hand only. Catching as little as 50 balls will make a real difference to this vital skill.
Catching is a one handed game
Catching is one of the most fundamental skills in cricket. There is an old adage that if your catching is good, your batting is good and there is definite merit in such a philosophy since both batting and catching involve movement of the hands towards a ball travelling towards you.
Cricketers are rightly encouraged to catch with both hands as it gives a greater chance of creating a large catching area. However, it’s vital to understand that although you catch a ball with two hands, it actually settles in one. Try it now – and you should find that the ball, although surrounded by both hands, actually sits very firmly in one hand whilst the other acts as a support.
Therefore it’s essential to make sure your dominant hand does the work as it will be the stronger of the two. For most people, their dominant hand will be the right just as most cricketers throw right handed. To ensure you catch correctly, make sure the little finger of your dominant hand overlaps the little finger of your non-dominant – you can do this simply by throwing a ball into the air and catching it with the emphasis that the dominant hand little finger is on top whilst the non-dominant is underneath.
For correct hand technique when catching, learning to catch one handed is an excellent idea and throwing a tennis ball against a wall is a very sound method of practising this. Throw 50 balls against a wall catching only with your right hand then do the same with your left – the position of your hand when catching one handed should be with the fingers pointing to the sky and the hand out in front of you, exactly as a baseball catcher would do.
Wello
