Geelong quick to aid

BARWON cricket manager Dom McGlinchey has backed the Victorian Country Cricket League’s suspect action policy, describing it as a policy “set up for community cricket”.

East Belmont quick Alex Willerton will soon undergo an eight-week intervention period with help from McGlinchey, also a Geelong Premier Cricket fast bowler, giving him immunity from being “mentioned” by umpires for the remainder of the GCA season.

Willerton has been officially mentioned three times, meaning East Belmont was required to film his bowling action for analysis. Players need six mentions before being suspended at community level.

McGlinchey has seen the professionally-recorded footage, which was recorded at training and sent to him earlier this week.

He will seek further guidance from Cricket Victoria’s high performance team before setting out a plan to help the 21-year-old iron out his action.

“I won’t be spending an hour a week or anything like that down there with him,” McGlinchey said.

“We’ll try and help out and get him on the right track, but then it's the responsibility of the club to do so.

“These occurrences aren’t all that rare — it happens all around the state — so cer- tainly there are some procedures there to take place and people who have hooked up with these situations in the past.

“I’ll consult first and foremost with our high performance department, who have got a lot more experience in this area than I do, and will use their guidance to make contact with Alex and come up with a bit of a plan.

“It may be some training aids. I haven’t dealt with one of these personally, but it’s certainly nothing that’s too unfamiliar in cricketing circles.”

McGlinchey said it was important to understand that the policy was created for community cricket, not for professional cricket.

“It’s not a Premier Cricket policy, which is a lot different, this is solely built on keeping people playing the game and remediating people so they come back with no issues and can continue to play the game for a long time,” he said.

“If the umpires at any stage deem it to be unsafe, they still have the ability to call a no ball if that’s the path they decide to go down.

“But I’m really confident we can get to a stage that doesn’t occur.

“I’m told Alex is really keen to move forward and try and iron the issue out, which is great.

“Obviously he’s got a big career in cricket ahead of him, it’s just one tiny little hurdle.”