tponement of the Nationals game against the Miami Marlins on Saturday night. The teams, and a few thousand fans, waited nearly four hours from the 7:05 scheduled start time before an announcemen

Graham Gooch once said, I dont coach batting, I coach run-scoring. In a sentence he defined the requirements of the games highest levels: those who arrived there already knew how to bat; what they needed to know was how to prosper on the mean streets, where the pressure was greatest and where any and every weakness would be found and exploited.It suggested, too, that technique is a servant rather than a master, a means to an end rather than the end itself. Ugly runs count the same as pretty ones; David Gowers and Shivnarine Chanderpauls look just the same in the scorebook, if not the history book. And as Alastair Cook, Goochs most famous pupil, has moved inexorably onto the list of the all-time top ten Test match run scorers, and Goochie himself got more than anyone else across all forms of cricket, hes probably on to something.Like all good buzzwords, technique has been thrumming through Test series between England and India, and Australia and South Africa. Theres nothing like a batting collapse to begin the self-evisceration. Speaking to the Guardian for a thoughtful examination of Australian concepts of batting written by Sam Perry, Ed Cowan said: One of [our] biggest issues is the attitude of attack at all costs, which I think is defunct in Test cricket. The message feeds through that weve got to pick attacking cricketers and that you need to be an attacking cricketer to be picked.In India, Haseeb Hameed is the new poster boy for doing it right, the baby Boycott, a kid with arms like sticks who hits through the covers with all of the easy power of a natural ball-player. Ben Duckett and Gary Ballance, having got it wrong, well, how must it feel to be them, to keep touring knowing that your tour is over and that stretching ahead is exile, and in that exile there are hard truths to be faced, hard labour to be undertaken.They will join a list of recent discards, from Alex Hales to Sam Robson, Nick Compton to Adam Lyth, James Vince to Ian Bell, who have various hopes of a recall somehow, someday. In that, they can look to Jonny Bairstow, who knows the feeling. When he was dropped from the side he averaged 27. He was out for 18 months and went through what he called some dark spots. In the summer of 2014 he missed six weeks of domestic cricket with a broken finger and afterwards his renaissance began.Bairstow addressed a point of technique. He felt that he was crouching too low in his stance, which led to a rigid right elbow and back and made him lunge at the ball, a fault compounded by a low backlift that often had him playing shots well in front of his body. He began standing up straighter and holding his hands higher, the bat hovering almost baseball-style as he waited. He still waggled the bat, but it came at the ball from a steeper angle and because of that it arrived later, which meant the interception point was under his eyes, where he was perfectly balanced. He laid waste to county attacks and was recalled for the 2015 Ashes. In 2016 he has made 1355 runs, more than any wicketkeeper in a calendar year, at an average of 64.52.Youve got two options, he says of being dropped. You either run and hide or you front up.It wouldnt have happened without a technical change, but then the technical change would not have happened without the desire to improve, to escape that darkness. He had what seems like the right attitude to technique, that it existed to serve him, to help him score runs. If he wasnt scoring runs, then he needed to find out why.Dean Jones, the former Australia batsman, has published a book called Dean Jones Cricket Tips (The Things They Dont Teach You At The Academy), about the kind of small improvements players need to make to evolve from being good professional sportsmen to international stars. He analysed a typical Sachin Tendulkar century, which took 180 deliveries, and found that Tendulkar left or defended around 70% of them - about 126 deliveries.It suggested that the ability to stay in remains a great batsmans primary quality. His array of scoring strokes, however wide and thrilling, are restricted to one ball in three. What all players looking to score runs must be able to do is defend forward and back and leave the ball well. To score runs, you begin by knowing how to not score them too.Its interesting that the most discussed technical flaws always apply to defensive technique. Englands most improved players, Bairstow and Ben Stokes, have improved most in that area. The problems of Duckett and Ballance lie there. For all of modern battings pyrotechnics, finding a way to stay in remains the key to it all, as Cook and Gooch continue to show.Michael Jackson Jersey . -- Brandon Jennings made the most of his first game with the Detroit Pistons on Sunday night. Ed Reed Jersey . Fernandez, coached in Toronto by former two-time Olympic silver medallist Brian Orser, scored 267.11 points and is the first champion to successfully defend since Russias Evgeny Plushenko in 2005 and 2006. http://www.customravensjersey.com/custom-ray-lewis-jersey-large-983d.html . -- Matt Rupert scored once in regulation and again in the shootout as the London Knights extended their win streak to nine games by defeating the Owen Sound Attack 4-3 on Friday in Ontario Hockey League action. Josh Bynes Jersey . Vettel, who has already clinched his fourth straight F1 title, enters the finale with a chance to equal Michael Schumachers 13 victories in a year and match the record of nine consecutive wins by Alberto Ascari in the 1952 and 1953 seasons. Anthony Levine Sr. Jersey . After a lengthy wait, persistent rain finally forced the postponement of the Nationals game against the Miami Marlins on Saturday night. The teams, and a few thousand fans, waited nearly four hours from the 7:05 scheduled start time before an announcement was made shortly before 11 p.MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- Alex Thomson threw two touchdown passes and the defense came up with three interceptions as Wagner ended a three-game losing streak with a 40-5 win over Robert Morris on Saturday.Thomson and John Williams hooked up on a 68-yard score late in the first quarter to put the Seahawks (5-5, 3-2 Northeast) up 10-3.Thomson finished 18 of 31 for 258 yards. Williams had four catches for 110. Jim Cooper kicked field goals of 33 and 27 yards, leavinng him one shy of tying the school season record of 16.dddddddddddd.Wagner finished with 428 yards on offense and limited the Colonials (2-9, 1-5) to 168 with five turnovers. Four turnovers in the first half led to 20 points before Santoni Graham returned a Joe Carroll interception 43 yards early in the second half to make it 33-3. ' ' '