1 A lot of my stuff is based around the basics. Head-hands-feet. Jack Russell once said to me, make your basics world-class, and then you can do all the funky stuff. So, one of the drills I spend hours doing is simply with a bunch of tennis balls and a racquet, setting myself up behind the stumps and getting somebody to hit balls quickly, one after the other, hard into the surface. That way, any technical deficiencies can be ironed out. The beauty of the drill is that if your hands are hard, the ball will bounce out. It forces you to relax, and ‘give’ with the ball. You can also subsequently work on one-hand catches. It’s all about grooving your rhythm.
2 Standing back to the quicks, I used to crouch down, as the old greats used to do it, and then I’d come up when the ball’s bowled. Now I stand more like a goalkeeper in football, which gives me the best chance of diving forward or to the side, or to spring off to claim an inside edge.