Thursday 10/12/09

Variety day today and I once again decided to deadlift. Experimented a bit with the warm-up though. Started with 2x10 Overhead Squats with the broomstick followed by some hip flexor stretches. Then did sets of 3 in the kalos stenhos get-up to the hips high position (3 left, 3 right). Followed this up with some romanian deadlift stretches, some snatch practice and jerk practice using the broomstick.

For the main set I was able to whack the 20's on each side of the bar for the first time in a while :) Followed this up with 5 reps of 55 kg. All in all a productive session.

Was quite bemused driving in to work this morning and listening to SEN. Because I have been driving my girlfriends car and don't have access to my mp3 player in the car, I have been listening to them in the morning on the way to work. Their bias towards all things AFL football is bordering on ridiculous but they managed to discuss other matters this morning - namely cricket.

They interviewed Terry Jenner who was Shane Warne's former coach. They were discussing the merits of a reality style / Australian Idol type show to discover the next Shane Warne. The fact that Warne was a one in a generation type bowler seemed to be lost to the interviewers as they continued to press the whole "so how would the show work" and "would you have Shane on it", etc. The fact that Jenner squashed the notion right at the outset didn't stop their incessant and inane questions.

Jenner did mention the difficulty of the current situation of development in under 19 players and in particular spin bowlers. They are groomed for bi-annual world cup tournament in which they play 50 over matches. The style of bowling required for this type of cricket requires a spinner to place importance on conceding fewer runs at the expense of taking wickets. Contrast this to Shanes day in which the development squads of his era played 4 day matches and he had the freedom to aggressively attack the stumps and try and take wickets.

So we have a situation where the system does not encourage or foster the ability of another Shane Warne. Again this seemed to be lost to the interviewers as well.

This reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers which goes into great depth on the "other" factors that contribute to greatness. The fact that Shane Warne with his freakish abilities was able to go through a system that encouraged his ability contributed to his overall ability. It would be interesting to discover what other factors may have contributed as well.