With the 2015 Cricket World Cup underway in Australia we spoke exclusively to former England A cricketer Will Jefferson about the game, modern training routines and how today’s cricketers stay fit and avoid injury.
ISEH: Just to find out a little bit about yourself first of all and your background in cricket. What led you to the sport?
WJ: I was a professional cricketer for twelve years, playing for Essex, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire. I had a contract while at Durham University where I was studying a Sports Science degree – I wanted to balance my academic commitments with developing a career in the sport. I’d always had a fascination with the nutrition side and the fitness-related needs of being a professional. The other thing that played a part is that I am extremely tall! Being 6 ft 10½, keeping physically fit was something I was always aware of. I became passionate about wanting to stay fit or overcome injuries, to help me reach my professional career goals.
I had seven years at Essex altogether. One of the head coaches at the time while I was there was Graham Gooch, the former England player; he had a phenomenal career and was way ahead of his time I guess. When he was a player, he was an incredibly hard trainer who really kept himself incredibly fit in an era when it wasn’t taken quite so seriously and there was less understanding about the link between mental strength and physical strength. He certainly had a big impact on me during my days at Essex.
ISEH: What were the drills that you found most challenging in building your match fitness as a batsman?
WJ: There were two particular drills, one from Graham Gooch and one from Peter Moores, which I remember stretched me to my absolute physical limits as a batsman.
Gooch was a tough character and tough in the way that he trained his players as well. He would do a lot of stuff to exhaustion. I remember doing some specific drills with him that as a young player it really was with a view to having you down on your knees by the end of the session! You were really out of your comfort zone, working through fatigue. One drill in particular I remember doing with him in the indoor school at Essex was a batting session where you faced six balls and ran a run, and then you faced another six balls and you ran two runs, and you actually had to run all the way up to ten runs. Obviously you would never do that in a game of cricket, but it was a way of testing you beyond your limits.
So when you faced another over, you then had to run eight runs at a good pace, then get your breath and face another six balls from Graham and then run nine runs, and then grab your breath and then run ten runs, and then actually go all the way back down to one again. So it would be a session that would last probably close to an hour and 50 per cent of that time you’re running between the wickets and the other 50 per cent you’re receiving balls delivered to you at anything between 80 and 85 miles an hour. So there was a real intensity to the way that he worked and the way that he trained people under his watch.
ISEH: Is the aim to build resilience, to ensure that in a match situation you’ve always got that little bit of gas in the tank?
WJ: If you train at high intensity and in scenarios where it’s real pressure testing, then actually you tick that confidence box – once you get out in the middle you feel you’re prepared for anything. After I moved from Essex to Notts, I represented the England A team and we did a fair amount of training at the National Cricket Centre at Loughborough University, and some of the sessions would include circuits and training before breakfast, at 6.30 or 7 am, and then we’d do repeated running exercises incorporating cricket.
Cricket has evolved a huge amount in recent years, especially in the last five years or so, and the physical fitness side is something that’s become very apparent. To become world-class, young players coming into the game need an understanding of what they can and can’t do physically that’s going to help them make it as international cricketers.
Peter Moores was my coach while I was with the England A team, he’s now currently the England head coach in Australia. In the drill that Moores ran at the National Cricket Centre, our challenge was to bat for half an hour. We had to run two runs, we were on a bowling machine and we had to run two runs in between every single ball we faced for half an hour. I think you got thirty seconds’ rest at the end of an over and you had to be running at 75 to 80 per cent of your maximum speed, so it was a pretty reasonable pace. And two players in our group managed to get to the end without getting out. I was one of them and Tom Smith, who’s the new Lancashire captain, was the other.
We were running the equivalent of probably 150 or 160 runs in 30 minutes non-stop. And in the last few minutes, as the clock counts down, you become very wobbly on your legs, you start to get very lightheaded, almost to the point of having blurry vision. It really is a challenge, designed to sift through the guys who would buckle under pressure or those who would have it in them to get right through to the very end.
ISEH: A bowler’s training needs must be different to a batsman’s, with a lot of high impact on the joints, on the knees and ankle, and the shoulder?
WJ: I know quite a few batsmen who have had back problems. Standing and batting for six or seven hours in a day, there is always going to be an element of parts of your body that take more strain than others. As a batsman, you’re quite crouched over in your stance, bearing your own weight. Bowlers often suffer problems to their knees, hips and shoulders; strains to the intercostal muscles (around the ribcage) and hamstrings can also sideline a bowler for some time.
ISEH: How do today’s cricketers combine achieving the peak physical fitness needed to excel with avoiding injury and staying match fit?
WJ: One of the big talking points in the English cricket calendar in recent years has been the volume of cricket played and how that affects players. Each county will have a different approach to finding that balance, where players are refreshed and reinvigorated at the start of the season but also have enough in their tank to be able to get through six months of very intensive cricket. One county had a Fun Fridays approach, where they would get the team playing games of football or squash. Another county had a ‘two weeks on, one week off’ policy so that their players were not bogged down by repetitive gym work in the winter months.
I think it’s what we’re realising in the game of cricket is the specific nature of training programmes. A wicket keeper would be doing very different drills on a repetitive basis to a 6ft 6 fast bowler, as would an opening batsman or a spin bowler.
ISEH: As well as being role-specific, is training also tailored to a player’s age?
WJ: I was at Leicester Cricket Club last week and I saw one of their fast bowlers who had a very successful seven- or eight-year period at Notts and then went to Kent; he has been doing a lot of swimming this winter. He’s now 36, 37 years old. He will want to be fit enough to bowl in excess of 500, maybe 600 overs in a summer because that’s what his team will be demanding of him. Therefore gone are the days of him needing to do bleep tests on indoor surfaces and running up and down nets or on concrete car parks.
I think there’s a lot more thinking now that goes into the protective work that’s undertaken pre-season, of making sure players are fit and raring to go for the summer months. When I was at Notts Mick Newell, who’s an England selector now, put a ban on anyone over 30 doing the bleep test. They might be tested in different ways, either on a bicycle or you know body fat tested but he saw little point in putting an ex-England player like Mark Ealham through his paces in what is a very high intense testing protocol that can jar people’s backs, knees and hips. And I think that’s very open-minded, whereas five or ten years ago it would have been more of a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
When I arrived at Essex they said ten years before my time, players would have arrived at pre-season not having done any training for the whole winter and their first day back they probably would have all gone for a jog around the park together and ended up in the pub having a few pints. This shows how far the sport has come in that respect.
ISEH: It seems that across sport in general there is shift towards trying to get that extra one per cent via healthy lifestyles as well as training routines. Is that the case in team sports like cricket?
WJ: I think it’s very true. There is a big difference between individual and team sports though. I think in team sports certain individuals do seek a release from the game and I think quite a lot of the time that players, myself included, who have really looked after themselves during a season, sometimes after six, eight, ten weeks of intensive fixture list and maybe some physical times, will feel that having a social evening or having a few drinks with friends away from the game is the best thing possible thing: it allows you to re-set yourself and come back to the game fresher. But there is a real seriousness now in the way that professional squads prepare themselves.
There’s also a place for team bonding and building team spirit by being involved in certain activities during the season that will bring people together and create that bond that is absolutely needed to be successful in team sport. I don’t think that team bonding activities will ever go out of team sports, no matter how much scientists proclaim the virtues of not drinking any alcohol at all. From sport to sport though, it is very different. The ‘marginal gains’ approach of British Cycling is very different to getting through six months of first class cricket.
In cricket in particular, a lot of players come into a season with very high expectations. The end of the season is a long way away, whereas if you are an athlete or tennis player you are aiming for more of a peak. Someone that springs to mind is the boxer Ricky Hatton in terms of his approach to his boxing career. He’d be at the very peak of his powers for the fights that he was involved in but in between he really let his diet and his social habits go, to the point where he was two very different physical specimens.
ISEH: In a busy cricket season you must also have to look beyond the physical towards the psychological aspects of sport?
WJ: I played with Andy Flower for five years at Essex; he had a lot of success leading England home and away Ashes wins, and a World T-20 victory. When he arrived his main issue with the fixture list was that when you won a game, you didn’t normally have the time to reflect on that victory and celebrate with your team mates because you were already having to turn to your attention to the next match. Sometimes that would be the following day, but almost always the following week. So there wasn’t that release that you could have that might only be for several hours in an evening or just for one night, where you can enjoy and celebrate each other’s successes, create that bond as a team; also to study what you’ve actually done that’s helped you win an important match, or get over the finishing line from a difficult position. And therefore not enough of the learning is taken and the season becomes quite a blur at times. I think this is something that could be addressed in terms of the future fixture list.
ISEH: How do you think a specialist sports medicine institute like the ISEH can help keep sportspeople fit and match ready?
WJ: As a professional, I was always going that extra yard to seek out somebody or seek out a method of training that would enhance my game or my outlook. I came across the ISEH at the launch of the RPDPS, the Register of Personal Development Practitioners in Sport. I believe an institute like the ISEH is well placed to form links with both national sports governing bodies and individual clubs.
ISEH: Thank you for your time.
Will Jefferson is a former professional cricketer who now works as a management consultant with Footdown, who work with senior leaders in sport and business to accelerate performance. He is a registered Personal Development Practioner in Sport.
The ISEH offers NHS and private treatment for a wide range of injuries and conditions related to sport and exercise, at high-quality facilities in Central London. Find out more about referrals and booking an appointment.