How a former baseball player is helping cricket crack the American market – Telegraph.co.uk

“I have been hitting a ball with a bat my whole life so it was just a matter of it changing from going straight to bouncing and swinging the bat more vertically. Once I started doing those things the right way, hitting a cricket ball came naturally,” Collins says. “The hardest part is being able to control the ball and judge the different shots to play. In baseball you take your best swing every time whereas in cricket you don’t do that. You have to be able to pick and choose your shots.

“People in cricket talk about keeping your head still but that is vital in baseball, too. In cricket they talk about a baseball swing when someone crunches it and I have been swinging like that my whole life. It is not much different to baseball. It is about seeing it and hitting it, whether it is spin or fast bowling.” Fountain played baseball in the late 1980s and had trials with major league teams in the United States before making a living as a cricket coach and has long believed it possible for players to cross codes. Cricketers have given baseball a go, most famously Ian Botham and most recently the West Indies opener Kieran Powell with the New York Mets, but none have made it, leaving Fountain believing it is perhaps easier to go in the opposite direction.

“I started communicating with loads of potential T20 players last year and many are very interested in getting into the whole T20 change of career thing,” said Fountain. “Basically what that means for me and cricket is there are thousands of potential T20 cricketers milling around the USA but they just don’t know it yet. Nobody has bothered to introduce them to this sport so that is what I am trying to do.For cricket to work in America there has to be Americans front and centre. They will not accept cricket unless Americans are playing.” 

Fountain says he has not coached Collins beyond teaching him the basics of cricket. “He picked those up watching the television to be honest. I am just trying not to override what he does naturally. He is a bat-on-ball athlete. The trick is to take what he brings to the party and fine-tune it so it is suitable for the game we play. He has had to work on judging length of balls, work on hitting with more vertically and the crucial thing has been to get him to cope with cricketing situations without destroying his natural ability and natural talent for swinging a bat.”