You should see an improvement in your timing and footwork because you've been learning for so long on Legend.
...honestly, it's also got a lot to do with setting the game at a level you find challenging and still enjoyable. I think too many people are trying to be heroes and set some impossible difficulty challenge for themselves, if you find "Amateur" fun/challenging, just stick with it. If you playing in career mode and finding the step up to PRO to difficult, lower the starting difficulty since that's an option now. I've done exactly that and finding my early career VASTLY more enjoyable and actually getting runs under the belt. "Pro" is about as high as I really want to go, to be honest... since that's essentially the online default and provides a nice balance of challenge and fun in both online and casual game play.
I'd say, based on reading
a lot of threads regarding batting in the game, it's 40% down to your difficulty level of choice, 30% practice and 30% the field-sets/fielders still needing tweaking within the game.
Honestly; Best practice you can do in this game is just playing casual matches against the AI and getting good in one specific area at a time. If you're more interested in batting, start with that. Or vice-versa.
One thing the game accurately represents is the difficulty level of mastering a specific game vocation, that's really how it should be. Takes a lot of skill to "be an allrounder" and I'm pretty horrible at bowling, but getting better at spin-bowling the more I spend time on it. I doubt I'll ever be as good as Matt, who's the best bowler I've played online and actually sets a plan, or seems to, most games I've played. If he bowls the same way against the AI I imagine he's getting a decent success rate. I stick to a plan when I bat and it suits me, I've seen others implement a similar approach but the one rule I don't break is during career mode I simply don't touch the power-shot trigger until I'm past 20 runs and my confidence level is high enough.
Timing comes much easier after that.