New Hampshire Motor Speedway is among the most difficult tracks on the NASCAR schedule, perhaps the most frustrating as well.Passes at the one-mile oval will come much harder than last week at Chicago, primarily because there is so little banking to support side-by-side racing in and out of the turns.This track requires drivers to capitalize on other drivers mistakes, much like short-track, or road-course racing.If a driver slips on corner entry, you must be in position to fill the opened hole. If a driver lifts ever so slightly exiting the turn, you must anticipate the weakness and create enough momentum to pull alongside on the long straights.Nothing comes easy at the Granite State track. Nothing ever has.I won a track championship here in 1992, the very early innings of my NASCAR career, and although theyve changed the track slightly a few times, it drives the same. Its the most fun -- and the most frustration that one can have in a race car -- all in the same lap!Three Keys To Winning1) The car must rotate through the center of the turn. Without this, youre forced to slow the car too much on entry, and you suffer mightily to create any speed on corner exit.Another way to look at this is that youre asking your car to swap directions, headed south into Turn 1, need to be headed north out of Turn 2, and while this condition exists at every oval, its far more critical at flat tracks because of the amount of braking required to execute the turns.Talented short-track drivers such as Denny Hamlin can rotate their cars with skill, by transferring weight through a combination of steering, braking and accelerating. But its temporary because you are manipulating a car thats out of balance, and you inevitably burn away a front or rear tire in the process.The cars most capable of winning are those that support above average corner entry speed, with positive steering allowing drivers to reach and retain the apron of the track to the center of the turn. Those are the cars that rotate best, they are pointed in the right direction earlier than others, allowing drivers to use more aggression straight off the turns.Watch for this, and it will appear fairly obvious.2) Be clean and fast on pit road.Losing spots at this track on pit road carries a terrible burden for drivers.Its worse than other places because the likelihood of damage in traffic is greater at New Hampshire than at most tracks.If you lose five spots on pit road, you force your driver to be more aggressive, particularly late in the race.This track seldom rewards aggression. Rather, it rewards precision.Drivers most capable of maintaining track position and preserving tires and brake balance will be best positioned to battle late. Those with fast cars faced with overcoming pit-road penalties will likely damage their cars attempting to quickly regain what was lost.3) Capitalize on restarts!Hamlin told me last time we competed at New Hampshire, I must get better, more aggressive on restarts.Thats more difficult than it seems for a driver of his style, one whos so good with his feet (smooth on and off the brake and accelerator). But its required in this era of NASCAR racing.Its as though the restarts require drivers to have a qualifying mentality, because so much is depending on it.Restarts are more intense than ever in our sport, they are also more critical.Who Wins?Martin Truex Jr. makes it back-to-back wins.Of the 16 drivers competing for the title, the driver of the No. 78 is likely feeling the least pressure.His ticket is punched to the next round, and combine that with Martins free-spirited approach, I believe it gives him a decided advantage.The Truex family has a successful history at this track, his father and brother having won in lower NASCAR divisions.Martin appears destined to add a Cup win to the family collection.The Bottom LineAfter NASCARs announcement to lighten the penalty, or relax the tolerance on postrace inspection, several teams, perhaps the majority, struggled to pass pre-qualifying Inspection.Whats odd about this is that the tolerances didnt change for prerace. So why did the majority of Chase contenders fail?Because competitors inherently take all they can get and then some -- its in their DNA and its difficult to deter .What NASCAR did this week was outstanding. In essence it said it is done governing how much pine tar you use on your bat (YouTube George Brett pine tar to get a full appreciation of my analogy), because we know we are splitting hairs.But if or when we discover a team has used a corked bat, there will be hell to pay!!Folks, I believe NASCAR has drawn a line in the sand when it comes to postrace inspection. I believe they have handled it perfectly, and I shudder to think whats going to happen to the team that pushes NASCAR too far and egregiously steps over that line. China Jerseys 2021 . -- Its been a long road back for Sean Bergenheim. Stitched China Jerseys . Westbrook has missed 27 games since having a procedure on Dec. 27 to deal with swelling in his injured right knee — the third operation on the knee in nine months. https://www.chinasjerseys.com/ . 10 Texas A&Ms offence dominated as usual against SMU. China Jerseys 2022 . Anthony Davis had 31 points and 17 rebounds in his seventh straight game with more than 20 points, but that was only enough to keep the Pelicans competitive into the final minutes. Andrew Bogut had 10 points and 15 rebounds for Golden State, which rebounded from a loss a night earlier in Oklahoma City and snapped a two-game skid. China Jerseys 2020 .ca! Hi Kerry, Heres an interesting one. I know its common knowledge that all players are responsible for their sticks. We witnessed that when Zack Kassian hit Edmontons Sam Gagner in the face after a missed check. If England fail to win this series and, as a consequence, do not make it to No. 1 in the Test rankings, they will surely look back on the second day of this match and rue the three chances they put down in the field.All sides drop chances. Even the best. And a couple of these, not least one to James Anderson in the slips offered by Asad Shafiq when he had scored just 7, were tough.But England have now dropped 14 chances in this series. Not half-chances - like the sort that flew over Alastair Cook and Joe Root in the slips off Asad Shafiqs bat (on 57) or even the sort that was edged between Root and Anderson from Misbah-ul-Haq (on 6), on Friday - but clear, catchable opportunities. Some have been, by the standards of international cricket, straightforward. The chance put down by Alex Hales here, off the first delivery bowled by Chris Woakes, certainly fits in that category. Pakistan, by contrast, have dropped 11 comparable chances.And when a team has dropped that many chances, they cannot keep dismissing the problem as an aberration. They have to accept that they have a problem and find a way of confronting it.One area the England team might like to look at is employing a full-time specialist fielding coach. While Chris Taylor will work with the limited-overs sides from time to time, it seems odd that, in an age when England have taken professionalism to such a level that it would seem amiss if dietary advice and psychologists were not provided as a matter of course, that such a fundamental part of the game - the part of the game that all players will have to do more than anything else - is so overlooked.England used to have a full-time fielding coach. But, over the last couple of years, it was decided that the two main coaches (Trevor Bayliss and Paul Farbrace) could absorb the extra work and cut down on the number of people in and around the dressing room. It wasnt a cost-cutting measure - the ECB is one of the richest cricket boards in the world - as much as a well-intentioned attempt to ensure the environment remained calm, controlled and player-centred. Quite reasonably, they wanted to cut down the number of voices getting in players heads.A couple of years later, however, it seems reasonable to conclude that the approach is not working. England are dropping too many chances. They may be getting away with it most of the time at present but, in India and Australia, such errors will cost them series. As Farbrace, the assistant coach, put it: If we are serious about being the No.1 side in the world - and we are but we are a long way off at present - then you have to take your chances and keep the opposition under pressure. Farbrace took exception - his words - to the suggestion that the England coaching set-up requires specialist assistance when it comes to fielding. As well as defending his own efforts, he made the reasonable observation that several other members of the support staff - not least the batting coach Mark Ramprakash and the bowling coach Ottis Gibson - also helped out as required.I dont think it comes down to the level of coaching, he said. We work very hard on it. Trevor has always worked with international teams: Sri Lanka and England. We do have an awful lot of coaches and there are enough people to work on fielding. There have been [specialist] coaches in the past, but Trevor wants to take it on and we spent a lot of time on it.There is no doubting the hard work and good intentions of Bayliss and Farbrace. Their fielding sessions are lively, enjoyable and tough. But can these coaches be expected to have the specialist skills required to help players with all the problems they face? Can they, as well as helping the batsmen and bowlers (and the England team does not have a full-time spin coach, either), help provide the specialist assistance to coax the best out of men fielding at cover, gully, the slips or short leg? Can they be reasonably expected to be experts in all these ppositions and have the range of drills - or the time to implement them - designed to improve the players performances in each of them?The evidence to date suggests not.ddddddddddddYou would expect Julien Fountain to agree with that view. He is a specialist fielding coach, after all, and has previously worked with West Indies, Pakistan, Bangladesh and, briefly, England. But he makes some interesting points about the value of much fielding practice and the value of specialist coaching.There are various reasons why catches go down, Fountain told ESPNcricinfo. There may be technical issues - though there shouldnt be too many at international level - and there may be tactical issues, such as a bowler not communicating when a slower ball or bouncer is coming.But the main problem tends to be concentration. While replicating match conditions is tough in terms of improving concentration - time constraints rarely allow it - every player should have a pre-delivery trigger, just as they do when batting, in the field.The best ways to improve are, according to Fountain, overload training and underload training. In underload training a player will be given a vast number of relatively simple catches, generally at low pace, to help groove their technique. With that done, they will have a period of overload training which might include reducing the distance between fielder and bat, increased velocity, distractions and perhaps the introduction of visual impairment, such as wearing goggles. Generally, though, all the training will come back to ensure that pre-delivery trigger is engrained so the fielder is ready - mentally and physically - should any ball come their way.Fountain believes there is a fundamental undervaluing of the worth of fielding in cricket. While baseball provides statistics to account for the cost of any miss, cricket offers only the most basic information: the number of catches or stumpings completed. There is no info on the number dropped or the cost of them.Equally he believes that the basis of most slip-catching practice - a coach edging a ball to a cordon - fails to replicate common match conditions. For while most coaching practice sees the ball guided off a horizontal bat, many of the actual opportunities come off a vertical bat with the ball travelling at a different trajectory. Fountain uses a slab of granite and a baseball bat (the ball is thrown on to the granite and edged towards the cordon off the baseball bat) in an attempt to replicate match conditions.It all amounts to the same thing: fielding, despite its immense importance, is an undervalued facet of the game.Perhaps there is another side to this. All too often in English cricket, dissenting voices are kept on the periphery because they threaten the comfortable existence of some of those in positions of influence. Not with the England team, so much, but at development level and at Bluffborough in particular.Take Gary Palmer, for example. He has now worked with Alastair Cook for 18 months - a period that coincides with his return to form - but remains unemployed by the ECB. If Palmer is good enough for the highest run-scorer in Englands history, why would he not be made available for other batsmen? Why would the ECB not want to employ him and use his skills, alongside other batting coaches, for the development of young players?Similar things may be said about Ian Pont (the fast bowling coach) and even Fountain.But perhaps because they threaten to undermine the opinions of some of those working in Loughborough, those who have built their reputations on deciding how coaching should look and feel, their expertise seems strangely underutilised.England will have to take their fielding more seriously - not just spent time on it, but examine the science and statistics - if they are to fulfil their potential. ' ' '