Player Diary: Fi Morris on her spell in Australia and a look ahead to Dubai/Bangalore
Myself and Ellie Threlkeld have just finished a six-week spell in Australia, which included some grade cricket and training with the New South Wales Breakers state team.
And I’m going to get this out of the way early.
I was playing for Gordon and Ellie for Sydney University, and we played against each other in our first game. Ellie ended up stumping me for a golden duck. Nightmare!
There was certainly a bit of banter after that.
In seriousness, I’ve said to Ellie that there’s not many people you can spend pretty much every waking minute with for two-and-a-half-months. But she’s one of them. I’ve been really lucky to have been able to share this experience with her.
That two-and-a-half-months has felt like a round the world tour.
We firstly had a 10-day batting camp with Thunder in Mumbai in January before both heading straight to Australia. I have penned this blog just as we prepare to head to Dubai to link back up with Thunder for our pre-season tour.
We both get there a couple of days before the rest of the squad, and the Lancashire men, land on Thursday. We then have four days in Dubai before heading to Bangalore for 10 days.
We’ve heard some brilliant reports from how training has been going back at Emirates Old Trafford. With Chris Read coming in, everything sounds really positive, and I can’t wait to be back with the girls. I know Ellie’s the same.
The Dubai leg of the pre-season tour will see us fulfilling some commercial commitments with our sponsors, combined with some training sessions and a T20 double header at the Sevens Stadium. Then, when both squads head to Bangalore, the focus will be firmly on the work done out on the grass.
Going back to Ellie, she naturally leads from the front as a captain anyway. But her work ethic is just second to none. That definitely rubs off on you as a team-mate.
It was brilliant to spend our weeks training with the state New South Wales squad.
I think it’s widely accepted that Australia are ahead of us in terms of women’s cricket at the minute, so it was really interesting to see what they did differently and see if there was anything that could be picked up and brought back to Thunder.
Ellie did pretty well with the bat for her side, while I had a bit of struggle. That can happen, though. It’s best to get the struggles out of the way early on.
I was much happier with how my bowling went.
I’ve actually changed my bowling action a bit this winter with the aim of trying to get a bit more turn, and this last six weeks has been a great opportunity to put that into practice.
It seems to be working well for me because I am turning it more and bowling with more confidence.
I felt like I bowled alright last year, but I could see room for improvement, and that was wanting to spin the ball more and be more attacking. I’ve worked hard on that with Stephen Parry this winter, and hopefully it pays off when we get home.
We took our last week in Australia as a holiday and both headed to Melbourne. My big sister lives in Geelong, so I visited her. It was great to have a bit of family time and down time before we get stuck into a busy season.
As I mentioned earlier, the reports from Thunder training have been really positive, with the girls really happy with how Chris has settled in as our new head coach.
I worked very closely with Chris in Mumbai, and I really enjoyed that.
It was interesting to hear his philosophies on batting, especially. I haven’t done any technical work with him, it’s been more on mindset so far.
He’s come in and said, ‘Look girls, I just want you to go and play positively without fear’.
It’s clear he wants us to play the type of entertaining cricket we all want to play and everybody wants to watch.
That definitely suits my game. I’m more suited to batting in T20 cricket, and I’ve struggled to strike the balance when it comes to 50-over cricket in the past. So going at it all really positively is definitely what brings out the best in me.
There’s no doubt that it can go wrong at times, but we’re confident it will go right more often than not and we can have a really good season.