With the cricket season coming up, we teamed up with Luv Savant, one of the lead coaches at NET Cricket, to give us five top tips for improving your batting this summer.
1. Fix Your Stance Before You Fix Your Shot:
Everything in batting begins before the ball is bowled. Your stance determines your weight distribution, your ability to move quickly, and the range of shots available to you. Stand side-on, feet shoulder-width apart, with your weight balanced slightly on the balls of your feet; not flat-footed. Your head should be level and still, with eyes parallel to the ground. Your grip should be relaxed; tight hands kill timing before the ball even arrives. Most batters who struggle with specific shots have a stance issue at the root of it.
2. Watch the Ball Longer Than You Think You Need To:
This sounds obvious. But watching the ball sounds like the most basic piece of cricket advice possible, and yet it's the most commonly violated principle at every level of the game. The mistake most batters make is watching the ball leave the bowler's hand and then shifting attention to where they plan to hit it. By the time the ball pitches, they're playing on instinct rather than information. Train yourself to track the ball from the moment it leaves the hand through the air, off the pitch, all the way onto the bat or the keeper's gloves if you leave it. This is a skill, and it takes deliberate repetition.
3. Pre-Ball Routine:
Between every delivery, the best players in the world go through a deliberate reset: tap the crease, take a breath, pick up the bowler's hand early, and trigger movement. It's a repeatable sequence that brings them back to a neutral, ready state regardless of what just happened. Most club cricketers have no pre-ball routine at all. They stand at the crease, think about the last ball, half-watch the bowler run in, and react too late. The result is rushed footwork, mistimed shots, and a reactive rather than proactive mindset. Develop a routine and drill it in training until it becomes automatic. It should take no more than three to four seconds. The goal is not superstition; it is a consistent reset mechanism that ensures your body and mind arrive at the same place before every single delivery, regardless of the pressure situation.
4. Do the Boring Drills:
The drills that produce the most improvement are almost never the ones that feel exciting to do. Shadow batting in front of a mirror. Dropping and driving off a tee. Repeated dead-ball defensive pushes against a single line and length. Footwork patterns with no ball at all. These are the drills that elite batters built their games on and the drills that most club cricketers quietly skip in favour of something more interesting. When there is no excitement, no variation, no unpredictability, your brain is free to focus entirely on the movement pattern it's trying to automate. Skill acquisition happens through clean, isolated repetition, not through the noise of a full batting session where a dozen variables are changing simultaneously.
5. Know Your Game and Stop Trying to Copy Someone Else's:
Every generation of club cricketers produces the same pattern: a player watches someone they admire, a Test batter, a teammate, or a YouTube highlight reel, and tries to bat like them. They adopt the stance, the trigger movement, the shot selection. And then they wonder why it doesn't work. The best batting technique is not the one that looks most like your favorite player's. It is the one that works for your body, your reflexes, your temperament, and your natural game. Harry Brook and Kane Williamson have radically different techniques. Both are among the greatest batters in history. Neither would succeed trying to bat like the other.
You can get 1-1 to coaching with Luv and the rest of the team at NET Cricket in Battersea or Windsor. Find out everything here.
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