cricket with balls

Bryce McGain is a thinker.

I don’t say that just because he wears glasses.

He has theories on things, and they don’t come straight from the cliché mill.

My favourite was about bowling.

He was talking about if he plays in India they will try and destroy him.

The really interesting stuff though was about his theory on bowling.

In his mind once the ball leaves your hand that’s it.

You can’t control what happens next.

You plan and then try and execute a ball to get the batsman out, but once the ball leaves your hand the batsman is in control.

Especially as a spinner you can land the perfect ball and the batsman can put it in the stand.

I think too many bowlers especially young bowlers, worry more about what the batsman will do than actually what they are doing.

Your job is to get the ball in the right position and then hope it’s good enough to make the batsman make an error.

You really can’t do any better than bowling a good ball, whether it gets hit for six, or gets a wicket is beyond your control once it leaves your hand.

It’s a different way of looking at bowling.

Other bowlers may think the same way, but I’ve never heard anyone explain it like this.

At the end he said no matter how far they hit me for six it wont change the fact that I know I can bowl.

He doesn’t just wear the glasses just for the ladies, I think he reads books and stuff.

He took his mum to the AB medal, and gets a little embarrassed saying so. I resisted the urge to ask if he got lucky that night.

He apologises for leaving after a mere two and a bit hours to pick up his son.

He bought me lunch.

He says lots of nice things about his mum.

He always stop when I unintentionally finish his sentences for him.

He appears to have a full head of real hair.

He doesn’t seem to mind that occasionally I ask a question that is really not a question.

He eats a vegetarian meal, although, he doesn’t finish his salad.

He seems to accept the fact that I have no idea what I am doing.

He really appreciates how lucky he is, he even likes to train.

He doesn’t ask the waitress to pour him some water he does it himself.

He seems to be able to string two and three sentences together at once, quite an achievement for a cricketer.

Some people will say you have to be intelligent to work in IT.

Others will say you have to be a nerd, or Indian.

Bryce McGain is not Indian, so it’s up to you whether you think he’s intelligent or a nerd.

What is for sure is that his brain is segmented into separate hard drives and has a lot of ram.

He was talking about how he bowls to certain batsman.

And unlike most bowlers I’ve talked to, he seems to have his own system for dealing with batsman.

He puts batsman into types.

The example he gave was of Phil Jacques and Simon Katich.

He said they play leg spin with a similar method, so rather than work them out individually, he lumps them into a type of player, and then works to a plan that he knows works to that sort of batsman.

I think he said he had like 10 different types of batsman, and he starts with the plan he thinks is most likely to catch them out, and then tweaks it as he goes.

Obviously no two batsman are the same, but it gives him 10 different ways to start to a batsman, rather than bowlers who have countless plans or none.

The most interesting thing about all this is that he mentioned Jacques and Katich being similar, and then he said, if you bowl to Shaun Marsh he is also very similar so you start with the same plan.

The Krab and the future serious batsman type batsman are similar.

It took bryce to think of this.

In the old days of film making, a director learnt his craft working on films in all sorts of other roles before he convinced someone he could direct.

Then came film schools, where eager young nerds plied their trade until someone saw their 4 hour opus on an egg and gave them a real job.

In recent times a lot of directors have learnt their craft via the directors commentary and the other special extras you can view on DVD’s.

Cricket has been similar to film, it started with learning on the job, moved to academies and now cricketers are learning from new viewing technology.

Bryce was a late starter in all aspects of cricket, he didn’t start playing district cricket until the age of 21, an age where most hopefuls have played at least 5 years already.

At 28 was the first time he received proper coaching on leg spinning.

27 was the age that English spinner Alex Loudon retired from cricket to be a boring fucker.

But McGain looks about as likely to retire from cricket as I am to join the Simon Katich fan club.

How did Joe Average become Bryce McGain, without formal training, academies and molly coddling from well meaning coaches.

The same way nerds learn how to speak Klingon, by watching way too closely.

The slow mo camera lets him watch the tenhniques in a way that means he can study every nuance of the delievery.

The speed clock lets him see when and by how much a spinner is varying his pace.

And the super duper long lens lets Bryce see the warts on other leg spinners hands.

Bryce isn’t a spectator, he is a student, a voyeur, he studies the game, like a virgin watching porn.

Learning from the subtlies, working out the field placements, trying to work out their tactics and watching the speed gun.

All these things that we take for granted as part of our entertainment, Bryce uses to get himself ready for international cricket.

This is the difference between you, the dude who won’t get up to take a piss, and Bryce.

He is not watching merely watching the cricket, he is the cricket.

It’s a zen thing, ask Phil Jackson.

By his own admission, “It’d be nice to be able to just watch the cricket and drink some cans and not even think about it”.

While you and I are watching cricket and turning into fat useless assholes, Bryce is using his viewing time to hone his skills for a potential match up with Sourav Ganguly or someone good.

Bryce is such a good student of the game he can watch a shithouse spinner and still get something from it “you pull your hair out and say Oh My God how are they playing test cricket, but there is stuff to learn off that as well.

Bryce still uses the Tv as a weapon in global domination, but he also has private sessions with Australia’s favourite ex jailbird Terry Jenner.

With Terry Jenner and a Remote control on his side, nothing can stop him now.

Cricket with balls is not a journalistic institution.

But due to recent developments and so forth, I was in a position to interview one of Cricket with Balls favourite sons, Bryce McGain.

It is fitting that Bryce is my first interview, as he was the first player to receive the “cricket with balls own” tag.

Bryce opted to meet in a café sea side.

The view of the ocean was horrid, but luckily the junkies made up for it.

For those who are interested, he wore a blue hoodie, and had just come from a session.

Bryce is a nice guy, which is lucky, given his other nickname of Nice Bryce.

Early on we covered the important things, like whether Dirty Dirk knows where he is bowling it, answer is no, and about how it came to pass that Bryce played for Denmark.

The Denmark story was a bit unexciting, but perhaps because I was expecting him to say, my father was an Earl of Copenhagen, and one day I got a call from Princess Mary asking me to do my duty for the national side or I would end up beheaded.

In fact he was playing club cricket over there and was picked to be the overseas player in the tournament that Scotland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland play against the county sides, of which the name has alluded me.

They must have had a strong side as Bryce batted in the middle order.

The fact he made 50 also tells you of the level of the opposition, no Brett Lee’s around.

Bryce is now a full time cricketer, leaving his job as ANZ IT bagman behind him.

Hence why he can sit in a café and talk shit about cricket for a couple of hours.

The one thing I noticed, and it happened repeatedly was Bryce’s constant reference to himself as Joe Average.

At first I thought it may have been a reference to his alter ego, some sort of superhero who puts out fires and saves kittens by night.

But no, this is how Bryce saw his life before Terry Jenner, Warne and I started name dropping him.

Notice how I slipped in my name into the same line as Shane Warne so smoothly.

Back then he was Bryce McGain, father, bank employee and cricket enthusiast.

Now he is Bryce Mcgain, the Facebook kid, Cricket with balls own, Nice Bryce, and potential test cricketer for Australia.

Surprisingly enough no one came up for an autograph during our time together.

Although the Chinese lady sitting next to us did say Leggie at one stage.

Or she was ordering a Veggie burger.

Stay tuned for Joe Average’s take on why he and I are better than you, Joe Average’s Facebook problems, Joe Average facing Brett Lee and other interesting Joe Average adventures.