Your club drops catches because nobody practises catching

Every club has the conversation in the bar afterwards. We should have won that. We put down three. And every club then turns up on Thursday and spends ninety minutes on batting.

Nobody drops a catch because they lack talent. They drop it because the last time they took a hard one at chest height in bad light was the previous Saturday, in a match, with the game riding on it.

The warm up is not the practice

Ten minutes of gentle pairs before nets is a warm up. It is fine. It is also nothing like the catch you actually get, which arrives quickly, at an awkward height, from an edge you did not see leave the bat.

Slip practice at most clubs is a coach flicking a ball off a bat while four people stand in a line looking at their hands. It builds the wrong reflex. In a game the ball comes at you off a stroke you have been watching for two seconds, and your hands go where your eyes tell them, which is why the drill has to start with the eyes.

What to do on a Thursday

Split the session. Half an hour of catching before anybody pads up, while people are fresh and can still see. Then nets. Not the other way round, because the last twenty minutes of a session is when everyone has stopped concentrating.

Vary the height. Most drills sit in the comfortable band between waist and chest. The ones that get dropped in matches are at the ankles, above the head, and to the side of the wrong hip.

Make somebody watch. A dropped catch in practice with nobody looking is a shrug. A dropped catch in front of eight team mates is the closest a Thursday gets to Saturday, and that pressure is the point.

Use a real ball. Tennis balls and soft balls are for young players and for rehab, and a hard ball at pace teaches your hands something a soft one never will.

The cordon

Pick the slips in April rather than at the toss. A cordon that changes every week never learns to move together, and the second slip who does not know whether first slip is going for it will always be a fraction late.

The same goes for the keeper. Ten minutes of standing up to a spinner, every session, will save more byes than any conversation about technique.

None of this is complicated and none of it is new. It is just less enjoyable than batting, which is exactly why your club does not do it.