A short documentary filmed inside an England Lions camp in Dubai in late 2022. Feauring Jofra Archer, Dan Lawrence, Rehan Ahmed, Tom Abell, Matt Fisher and Sam Cook, and coaches including Graeme Swann, Ian Bell and Jon Lewis.

 

The Lions sit one step below the Men's first team - players on the cusp of selection or coming back from injury. In 2022, with England's Test team playing a markedly different way, the question was how to push that thinking down the pathway. This camp was part of the attempt and the programme was made to be shown further down still, to the county boards and coaches developing the players who come next.

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What we found was less a camp than a redesign of what practice is for. Sessions were built around scenario practice rather than traditional nets. Third innings, sixty behind; a chase on a fifth-day pitch - with players made to decide under pressure and then live with it. Ian Renshaw, brought in to rethink practice design, frames a mistake in training not as a mistake but as exploration. Jon Lewis draws the comparison with actors: learning your lines isn't the same as rehearsing the play.

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The persuasion comes from the people who played the old way. Swann on how he was taught, as a young spinner, to set protective fields - and how completely he came to reject it. Bell on the 2005 Ashes, and the recognition that trying so hard to survive was the thing that stopped him scoring.