Cricket Drills - Catching

Cricket is a very demanding sport, to cope with that added demand, you should start off at an early age. Cricket allows children and adults to stay fit, and it teaches the importance of team working. The easiest and most effective form of helping anyone become the next Sachin Tendulkar, is through training and drills at a regular schedule.

The drills we have put together are not just amazingly simple cricket drills, but they are so easy to do that even under 5 year olds can do them. In addition to being simple and easy, they also help you can improve your catching skills as a fielder in cricket.

Warm up Drill

Warm up is the most important drill in any kind of sport or exercise. It gets you in the mood for playing cricket and helps your muscles to get ready for throwing, batting and catching. This very simple warm up drill is made up of 2 teams (as many people in each as you want, the recommendation however is of 10 people, 5 in each team). 

You set up 2 squares with 4 cones and inside them, place the stumps. You can pass the ball along the ground, you can run with the ball, but passing must be underarm and along the ground. You are not allowed to make overhead passes at all. Your aim is to hit the stomps, but there is a catch, no one is allowed within the squares. Additionally the ball can never go out of bound, as there are not limits to the size of the ground. My recommendation if children are doing this would be to use a smaller area. Remember, this is a warm up drill, is doesn't and shouldn't be an intensive exercise.

Short Catching and Underarm Throwing

This is a very easy to do and supper effective. The main goal of fielding in cricket is to catch the ball before it goes out of bounds. This amazing drill gets your hands in the 'mood' of catching thrown balls, the best part, this is for all ages and genders.

To preform this drill, you use a cone to set up an area where the fielder stands, then use another cone and set up a queue of about 5 people. The fielder rolls the ball out, the first player in the queue picks it up and throws it over the cone, to the fielder. The first player goes to the back of the queue. This process is repeated until the last player, who goes to the fielding position rather than the player position.

To make this more challenging and fun, you can set up teams and challenges for players to achieve. For example you could set up so that the first team to have 20 throws and catches perfect, without any interruption (not catching the ball, ball hits the ground, etc.) wins.

Catching Drill

This very simple and effective drill tests the player's reactions and accuracy. This is the easiest to set up in this list and it only requires at least 2 players. 

To set this up, you place 2 cones at your chosen distance and have 2 players stand behind them. The cones must be at a straight line, opposite to each other. Give one of the players a ball and have them throw, so the other player catches. You could set this up so that the players are close together and they make underarm throws, or that they are far away and make more powerful, overarm throws. Or, even better, you could have them closer together t the start, then gradually move them further away from each other. 

This could also be converted into a competition to have all players engaged. To do this, you need more people, it could be your friends and family. Have them throw and catch, if a throw is misplaced and the player is unable to catch, they are out of the game. The last one surviving wins. An alternative to this is to have them throw as many throws as possible in a given time (such as 60 seconds). To make this a harder training set, you could have them close together when you start and gradually increase the distance between them. This is not just fun, but it trains your catching ability, because lets face it, sooner or later you need to be a fielder in the realms of cricketing.