The need for speed

Jenny's point of view

Please sir, can I have some more ... pace? © Warren Page

"I love speed!" screams Ian Pont, Essex's fast-bowling coach and a man who claims to have unlocked the secrets of bowling fast - without sacrificing accuracy.

While he may love speed, these days he's swapped his TVR and his quicker ball for a diesel car and the coach's tracksuit. He's a confident man, so confident in fact that he has invited us to Essex's County Ground for a coaching session. And he's brought his speed gun.

Pont's methods are largely to do with biomechanics, which he first learned about in America nearly 20 years ago. "You can bowl faster and straighter by understanding how your body moves," he says. "It was a revelation for me to find out you can throw harder, using your hips to drive harder."

Eschewing the ECB's code, although he is taking his Level 3 badge, Pont has now set up his own bowling academy - Hell, he's even set up his own bowling qualification - although the question all of this begs, nay screeches, is why? "The ECB are about injury prevention, I am about fast bowling," he says, which is fair enough. And he's keen to stress he's on the ECB's side: "It's not a rival to the ECB, it's just an alternative. It's just something else." And he wouldn't rule out taking over from Kevin Shine if ever offered the England fast-bowling coach job, and would like to help them improve.

"I am onside with the ECB," he says. "But there are things that can be done far better than they are in cricket coaching. Troy [Cooley] was the first to admit that at the ECB. I feel now, more than ever, that the ECB coaching is open to suggestions and is a 'work in progress'."

Pont's methods are in tune with those of Cooley, his replacement Kevin Shine and Dennis Lillee - but he only discovered that fact recently, upon visiting Lillee's Academy in India earlier this year. "I've never fitted into what the ECB have done," he says, "but we crossed over at this point. I felt like a desert island survivor. I thought I was the only one. But no, there's three others! I thought, 'Where have you been?' They said, "Mate, we've been here all this time!""

For the meantime, Pont is definitely an individualist, and he knows it. To this end he has named both his academy (and, bizarrely, his own advertising company) - Mavericks. He has improved Darren Gough, Andre Adams and Ronnie Irani. But now for a more testing challenge: us.

Andrew and I limber up and bowl an over each just to see how fast we are pre-tinkering. Andrew clocks an average of 61.5mph, and I'm a heady 49.5 (erm, accuracy has always been my suit...). We're a bit slower than the average club bowler (70-77 mph) and much, much slower than Pont's idol, Brett Lee (95+) - but at least that means there's room for improvement, eh?

Pont immediately spots the flaws in our actions - especially our follow-throughs, which are clearly rubbish, and our chests which are, sadly, weak. Oh dear. What follows are tweaks to our action here, there and everywhere. Pont explains that these improvements would usually be tuned over ten sessions - and to train the muscle memory 10,000 repeat actions are required (you can cheat by engaging your conscious brain and making it 500) - but we don't have time here.

What we do have time for is to practise bowling with half-kilo handweights (the weight of five cricket balls, which provides momentum for our follow-throughs) and to practise holding on to an elastic band to create a banana shape for that catapult effect. Also, Pont is keen for all fast bowlers to work in straight lines (no wonky run-ups, no tailing off to the side on your follow-through). All are neat little drills - even if you would look ridiculous practising them in Hyde Park - and you can definitely feel the difference.

Of course, one of the attractions of fast bowling is that you can hurt people, as the legendary hurtler Jeff Thomson said. This J Thompson, alas, has more modest ambitions of shattering the 50mph-mark. It's time for the reality check.

Result! We're both faster, me by a giddy 2.5mph and Andrew by a dizzying 1.5mph. It's not earth shattering, but is potentially stump shattering. Ish (at our speed, 3-5mph equates to a yard more pace). We feel better, at least, and Pont says that if we were to have more sessions, our speed would rise even more.

Let's get the professional's view. Jahid Ahmed, the 20-year-old Essex paceman, is quick to praise Pont, with whom he has worked since 2005. "Last year I could bowl 78 or 79mph, this year I've been clocked at 84. And my line and length is more consistent. I had a few problems with my technique. We looked at videos, at what had gone wrong. I used to crunch backwards, we looked at that... Running in a straight line, it's neater. And going straighter."

He's convinced. I'm convinced. But is my colleague?

Andrew's point of view

Andrew ramps it up ... but, hold on, where's the ball? © Warren Page

This one-on-one coaching lark is a brand-new experience for me. At school, I was always just that little bit too rubbish for anyone to waste their time fine-tuning me, and since then I've settled into a rhythm that chugs along like a trusty old Trabant. A steady seven-pace run-up and then drop it on a length. I used to delude myself that I was quick, but I've long since known that I'm nothing of the sort.

But the lure of the speed-gun still intrigues. A friend of a friend once faced Paul Collingwood and conceded he didn't see a thing, which begs the question, just how much of a trundler am I really? So up I lolloped for six sighter deliveries, most of which passed pleasingly close to the top of off stump, if a touch sluggishly.

"Do you know what your fundamental problem is?" asked Pont, as he called us over to run through the issues he had noted. "You're doing what is known in the trade as 'bowling round your arse'."

At least I wasn't bowling a pile of arse, I figured, but on inspection, he was entirely accurate. Pont instructed me to drop the cricket ball and walk through the final stages of my action. Up I stepped to the crease, stretching into my delivery stride, whereupon I realised that my left hip was stuck facing the batsman, and my body weight was being forced to pivot uncomfortably at the base of my back.

"Power derives from the hips," explained Pont, making as if to push over a wall. His logic was flawless and devastatingly simple - and it explained why, when I'd tried to crank the pace up as a 17-year-old, I had suffered an agonising back strain that wrote me off for the best part of the season. I've been wary of bending my back ever since, but now, with my hips facing straight down the pitch, all I was doing was a high-speed bow - and with a modicum of flexibility there's no danger in that.

A few more tweaks and suggestions followed. Why such a convoluted wind-up in my delivery stride, Pont asked? He explained there's no point in stretching your bowling hand way above your head, when all you're about to do is bring it straight back where it came from and off in the opposite direction. Fair cop, and to this day, my hand has not strayed from my eyeline until the very last moment. I think it might just have made a subtle difference.

But one thing bothered me about all this tinkering. My hero as a child was Angus Fraser - I loved the way his bowling got better the more knackered he became - and his opinion of bowlers who worshipped the speed-gun could not have been more succinct: "I always thought it was just an excuse to bowl expensive crap."

After taking on board these suggestions, I was now bowling 62.5mph crap, a shade quicker than Shane Warne's flipper, but on every side of the wicket and with not an iota of subtlety. "I don't care where it goes, I just want to see that reading go up," urged Pont, which was all very well but at what cost? Even allowing for the condensed nature of our session, a 65mph scattergun is no use to anyone.

Pont's favourite case study is Lee - a biomechanist's wet dream, maybe, but a man who is prone to disappearing at five an over in Test matches and is arguably living proof of Fraser's earlier assertion.

Pont's favourite bug-bear, on the other hand, is Matthew Hoggard - one of the form bowlers in the game at present, but another man who bowls round that arse. "I've got to correct it," said Pont, almost pleadingly. "He's a world-class bowler in spite of his action not because of it."

But is that really true? Hoggard's stock delivery is that booming outswinger - a product, surely, of his unreconstructed action that also curves away to the off side. James Anderson, he of the appalling head position, also had an enviable ability to swing the ball at good pace, but it was coached out of him over the course of too many net sessions. Pont does point out in the very first sentence of his book, "over-coaching is as bad as under-coaching", but I still sensed he was keen to make one size fit all.

But then again, I've never been coached before, and most batsmen who face me would argue that it shows. The secret, as all professional cricketers would agree, is to take on board the bits that suit you and subtly discard the rest. Perhaps the most important thing about an enlightening session is that I have been made to think about my action for the first time ever. And as a 28-year-old club trundler with delusions of grandeur, it means I can dare to dream once again.