Two of the Spanish Academy Squad followed up their two T-Twenty games with the Tom Maynard Trust with a training session at Desert Springs with some of the bowlers from Sussex County Cricket Club.
Ravi Panchal of La Manga and Jamie Roper of Sporting Alfas were chosen by the Cricket Espana management to sample this unique experience and today Jamie follows in Ravi’s footsteps and shares his experiences with the CE Website.
Below is Jamie’s diary of events for the day …
“When Ravi and I received an e-mail from our new Spanish national team manager Manuel Fernandez offering the chance to train with Sussex CC there was no hesitation at all in saying yes. When meeting Ravi for the first time in April 2010 in a Spanish academy under 17´s pre tournament training camp as 15 year olds, this opportunity was something that we could never had imagined.
We travelled early Saturday morning with Andy House down to Desert Springs, after a small breakfast and taking a few moments to admire the views and surroundings of this fantastic location we took a five minute journey to the state of the art cricket training facilities to be welcomed by ex England bowler Jon Lewis, bowling coach of Sussex CC. After introducing ourselves we warmed up to be ready to start this fantastic opportunity to be training with the Sussex Bowling squad.
We were set the challenge of bowling 6 overs against Tymal Mills & Steve Magoffin. This was the first time I had ever bowled on a grass wicket so it took me a few balls to get used to the run up & landing. The Sussex players were very approachable and kept giving us tips and advice on where we could improve on technique, action and delivery stance.
After an hour or so a few of the Sussex players had a gym session so we packed our kit away and watched the rest of the squad carry on with their pre-season training. Jon Lewis had asked Ravi and I to stay behind to watch Lewis Hatchett go through one of his bowling drills in swinging the new ball between two sets of stumps on different lengths. It was amazing to see just how quick and talented these bowlers are, we learnt a lot by just admiring Lewis on this exercise and we will now be taking all these tips back to our clubs and trying them out for our selves.
After spending a good couple of hours with the Sussex camp we let the guys carry on with their season preparations, so we said our thanks to all of the squad and took a few photos for fantastic memories, On Sunday night I tweeted Jon Lewis, Ajmal Shazad & Lewis Hatchett just to say a massive thank you again for all their help over the session and good luck for the upcoming season. Would like to take this opportunity to say a massive thank you to everyone involved at Cricket España for granting Ravi and me this experience.”
Jamie Roper (Spanish National Academy)
As echoed by Jamie, many thanks to all involved in making this happen, and special thanks to Sussex CCC and their coach Jon Lewis for allowing the Cricket Espana boys to be an integral part of their coaching drills for the day.
Link to Ravi Panchal’s diary of the day –
https://www.cricketspain.es/article_edit_two.php?id=1242
