In February 2019, I was standing on the first tee at PGA Catalyuna, 30 minutes from Girona. It was 21 degrees, a slight breeze with not a cloud in the sky and the Sierra Nevada mountains glistened in the distance. The redolence of spring floated in the cool air.

I had found myself there by rather a lucky coincidence. A week’s holiday to Barcelona with my long suffering other half had been booked as a precursor to leaving my life in Lebanon behind, the country that I had called home for seven years, and returning to Cambridge to look after my terminally ill father.

She’d been insistent that we book our hotel before our flight – just to be on the safe side. Like usual, I’d ignored her (As an aside, she often tells me I never listen. My response is that I always listen. How else would I be able to do the opposite of everything she says?).

Unfortunately (or perhaps, in hindsight, rather fortunately), it turned out that the week we’d booked coincided precisely with The World Mobile Conference and, with 100,000 delegates in town, every hotel was fully booked. ‘Don’t worry hayete,’ I explained. ‘I’ve found us an amazing deal at a beautiful 5* star hotel in the countryside. What luck!’ I may or may not have failed to mention it was at a resort with two golf courses and was an hour and a half from Barcelona – consensus on this topic has still not been reached two years later. Anyway, I digress…

‘Hola 7amez,’ I said to the starter in my comically bad Spanish accent (his name tag told me he was ‘James’). ‘Como estas?’

‘Not bad mate,’ he replied in his startlingly bland English accent. He was from Lincolnshire it transpired and, having come on holiday to Northern Catalyuna 12 years previous, he had never left. ‘Why would you?’ he explained, a sentiment with which it was hard to argue.

James, as we had now established his name was pronounced, and I got chatting. He was a very good golfer and played off 3. But, he explained, in spite of having played golf for 40 years, worked on a golf course for the last 10, and with daily practice and much frustration, until two years previous he had been perennially stuck with a handicap of 11. So what had changed?

Rather prosaically, he told me, the only difference was he’d started practicing his short game. After doing the same thing for 40 years and not improving, very quickly his scores came down, his frustration decreased and his enjoyment went up.

Of course, this is never going to be completely analogous with cricket – there’s no direct equivalent for the short game. But I think the point worth making is perhaps in cricket, particularly with batting, we don’t improve because we are looking for improvements in the wrong places. Sometimes, the keys to improvement, like with James and his golf, are staring at us in the face but are so blindingly obvious we just don’t see them.

This topic came up in conversation recently with Joy. With lockdown making in person sessions impossible, she had taken to sending me videos of her hitting tennis balls in the living room – editing out the odd smashed light bulb and broken window. Conversely, I had been sending her YouTube links of batters who I thought exemplified the areas in which I thought she might improve.

Recently however, I tried a different tact. I sent her a video of Dom Sibley as an example of what not to do. In spite of what Joy has been told by coaches and armchair enthusiasts alike – that women cricketers are unable to hit the ball through the off side – her main issues pertain to the opposite.

Like many amateurs who play at a high level (and even many professionals), she is very strong through the off side but she can struggle to access the on. Certainly for right handed batters, I believe that the very best – those who would fall in the category of great – see the ball hitting the stumps as not a danger to their wicket but as an opportunity to score.

Ricky Ponting, Sachin, KP, Michael Clarke, Steve Smith et al. may appear to be LBW candidates but their averages would suggest otherwise. They play predominantly on length rather than line. A ball hitting the stumps is invariably full and, unlike the ball outside off stump, the outside edge is rarely at risk.

My main technical point with regards to Sibley was that, coupled with an overly strong top hand grip (to steal a terminology from golf), he gets his hands away from his body and they end up outside of his bat. From there, it becomes very difficult to present a straight bat to a ball angling into the stumps. ‘If he can score runs batting like that’ I posited ‘how many would he score if he just batted like a normal person?’

Joy, who as a world class cellist, a England international lacrosse player and an elite triathlete, knows a thing or two about both excellence and technique, made the salient point that it takes a huge amount of courage to reassess one’s approach and to build up new and different skills. He’s a professional sportsman, I countered. Tiger Woods won the Master’s by 12 shots as a 21 year old and promptly dismantled his entire technique because he felt he could be more consistent.

So, what if the thing holding us back is fear of something new rather than anything inherently complicated. It took James 40 years to change his approach to golf and, when he did, he improved drastically in a very short space of time. Tiger Woods struggled for a season after (he only had one victory and eleven top 10s including in three of the majors and remained number one in the world…). Over the next three seasons he won 23 tournaments, including a scarcely believable six in a row and, at one point, held all four majors simultaneously.

Last year I did a bowling machine session with a friend, who for the purpose of this post, I will call Phil (also – Phil is actually his name). Destined for greatness after he broke into his school 1st XI as a 14 year old, there are times when he makes batting look easy in a way that few are able. 6ft 4, he plays shots of which VVS Laxman might be proud, using all his reach to hit spinners against the turn through midwicket with what seems little more than a flick of the wrist.

But Phil hasn’t graced international grounds like VVS – over the last 10 years or so, he’s predominantly played 2nd team cricket in the Hertfordshire Leagues. While strong and powerful through the off side and with the ability to take balls from outside off stump and heave them through midwicket, he has one major weakness. He struggles to hit straight balls going on hit the stumps.

For years, Phil has surmised that it must be his head position – even going so far as to balance a water bottle on his head while his boss throws him screwed up balls of paper which he hits with an umbrella (he works in property - an industry so renowned for conscientiousness that, on busy days, one only has time for three pints over lunch while watching the test match).

In the session, I made the point to Phil that his head falling over wasn’t the cause of this issue but rather a symptom. Like Sibley, he gets his hands the wrong side of his bat and his head movement is an extension of this.

We worked on getting his backlift more to second slip area with the hands remaining closer to the body. But I also suggested he adopt a trigger movement and open his stance. He tried it for one ball and didn’t like it. It felt too uncomfortable. So he went back to doing what he did and the next ball – a gentle inswinging half volley – knocked his off stump out the ground.

Much has been made of Root’s return to form. Journalists feel vindicated in their assumptions that he’s been playing too much cricket. He was drained. A break has given him clarity and a freshness of mind. Thank God he no longer plays 20/20 etc. But few of them seem to have listened to the reasons he has given for his improvement – time spent working on his technique with particular emphasis on his trigger movements.

Like the short game in golf, how many cricketers (club and professionals alike) might improve drastically if they returned to their fundamentals - their stance, their grip and their trigger? Of course, doing something different from what you’ve done before may feel uncomfortable for a bit. It may take some courage to change something you’ve always done. And there’s always the argument that you shouldn’t change something mid season.

But while something that isn’t broken might not be worth fixing, the same can’t be said for something that is and, let’s not forget, Steve Smith changed his technique midway through a test match, scored a double hundred and has averaged 70 since. Ultimately, perhaps, the hardest change is the mindset. You never know – the rest might come naturally.