Rising above Mediocrity.
Posted by Comical Braces on
Thursday, 11 January 2007
Happy New Year Sportsfreaks. I thought it was about time that I updated you all on progress in this vital campaign, as well as imparting some of the thinking behind my innovative battle plans.
Despite the recent loss of our great leader, we will still carry on the battle. The recent skirmish with the Sri Lankans provided me with a great opportunity to adopt now strategies; rotation, playing people out of position and out of depth, discarding the captain for the bulk of the campaign and introducing a great new concept called periodising. This concept is so fresh that hardly anyone knows what it involves. Clearly the mark of a genius.
This periodising process I have adopted has been an enormous success to date. Although the team has been performing below expectations the relative player performance benchmark success ratios have been extremely pleasing. We now have a much wider pool of players, both cricket and softball, who have been exposed at the top level, which provides us with that extra level of analytical information required.
In addition to this, our ground-breaking approach to practices, by making them optional and not focussed on such menial activities as undertaking batting and bowling drills, means that everyone is maintaining freshness. I can promise you; we will not fail due to burn-out.
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" For a start, they have nowhere the breadth of experience in the captaincy department that we now have, and I predict this is likely to prove crucial " |
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I have once again been disappointed by the lack of understanding from various commentators in the media as to what I am achieving. Only Richard Boock has realised that I am many moves ahead of the opposition and that I am clearly on another level. Jonathan Millmow’s attacks on my plans were very ill-informed, and shows you can’t really take anyone who wasn’t involved in the great New Zealand sides of the 1980s seriously.
Australia have greater skill levels at an individual level than most other teams in the world, but that is not something that will concern us. We have identified a range of weaknesses in their collective formation, and will be able to exploit that. For a start, they have nowhere the breadth of experience in the captaincy department that we now have, and I predict this is likely to prove crucial. Our analysis has also shown that their batting often takes an over or so before they put their foot down, and they are not as strong once they are 8 or 9 down. We just need to hone our approach to take advantage of this.
We feel we have very little to fear from England. As I told the team in one of our voluntary motivation sessions, the problem with them is that they are badly coached. Duncan Fletcher is overly loyal to players who have served him well in the past, and his team has a low morale. He doesn’t know where in the order to bat players, he comes up with crazy strategies, changes his captain mid-way through a campaign, and refuses to acknowledge weaknesses or accept that his team is getting soundly beaten. In fact, I expect him to lose his job and be replaced by John Wright after the World Cup.
This analysis obviously hit home with the troops as they all started laughing. So this has lifted the mood even further in the camp, adding to the positivity index.
So hold tight for the campaign ahead; I can promise you that I will produce even more surprises, as soon as I think them up.
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