The Cricket Mentoring Podcast · Cricket Mentoring

Marie Kelly on Using Gratitude to Overcome Bad Form

·46 min·3 clips

Marie Kelly says she flipped from “bitter and angry” to “how lucky am I?” before her 89 off 63.

Marie Kelly starts by looking back at a time when cricket had become professional and full-time in name, but was still only a few days a week, with most girls still having jobs on the side. That keeps the conversation grounded in the realities of the pathway. She and the host move into technique quickly. Kelly says her left side has long been a weak point, and this year she tried to change quite a bit of it. The winter work in Perth with Tom and Ammar gave her the space to do that properly. She is clear that big technical changes need time and a lot of balls. A smaller tweak can help during a season, but a full rebuild is a different job entirely. Kelly points to the change she made during Covid as the exception that worked, because she had two years to hit as many balls as she wanted. When the season began, the new shape did not immediately turn into runs. That struggle becomes part of the lesson. She talks about learning that you cannot always force a change and expect instant results. The episode then gets very specific about what was going wrong. When she got tense, the bat crept closer to her body. That left the face more open than she wanted, and it fed a stretch of snicks and drives in the air. Ammar noticed the face opening up. Craig Cummings, who had come over to the Blaze from New Zealand, spotted the bat sitting too close. Between them, they helped her close the face and get out of a bad hole in the summer. Kelly also says mentality matters, because tension can show up in the body before it shows up in the scorebook. The closing note returns to patience, timing in women's cricket, and the idea that you do not always need to over-hit the ball.

As heard by us

A grounded look at fixing form without losing your nerve.

Marie Kelly talks through bad form without pretending there is a quick fix. The focus stays on the details: a weak left side, a bat face that drifted too close and opened up, tension changing the mechanics, and the slow work of correcting it with Tom, Amar, and Craig Cummings.

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Why you'd press play

You want a calm reset for a batting slump.

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