How To Bowl Leg Break?

Actuate

New Member
Hi guys, so I'm an untrained spinner. Looking at some videos, and learning more about spinning, I realized all this time I have been bowling the googly, and have no variation. So my stock ball is the googly, which has got me many wickets, but I have no variations.. So, I decided to learn leg break and make the googly a variation, any tips on how to learn leg break? Thanks :)
 
Not uncommon for legspinner to start out as what they used to call a bosey bowler, especially if your self taught.

Two things you could look at are where your elbow points and where the back of the hand faces at release.

Good way is to stand pretty close to a wall and concentrate on having the palm of your hand facing the wall and the elbow pointing downwards and not upwards as you release. You have to get the ball spinning anti clockwise off your third finger onto the wall and it should spin to the left off the wall and you catch with left hand. For a legbreak your right hand should end up facing the wall a bit like how someone might hold their hand up to stop traffic or wave goodbye.

At the moment you must have the back of the hand facing the batsman or even the ground and your elbow pointing almost skywards. Try that against the wall and it will spin right and you will catch with right hand. The wall never lies.
 
Hi guys, so I'm an untrained spinner. Looking at some videos, and learning more about spinning, I realized all this time I have been bowling the googly, and have no variation. So my stock ball is the googly, which has got me many wickets, but I have no variations.. So, I decided to learn leg break and make the googly a variation, any tips on how to learn leg break? Thanks :)

Hey,

A lot of us were in this position at some point or the other. Credit to Dave (someblokecalleddave) for formalizing this condition and calling it the googly syndrome. Discussion over at http://bigcricket.com/community/threads/googly-syndrome.56366/ might be helpful to you.

Cheers,
shrek
 
I can only bowl the leg break and topspinner and I have been trying incredibly hard to learn the googly but haven't been able to get it so far
 
I can only bowl the leg break and topspinner and I have been trying incredibly hard to learn the googly but haven't been able to get it so far

Googly is the most overrated delivery in cricket ever! It is very easy to pick, difficult to disguise, too strenuous and on most occasions has a very different trajectory to the legbreak with much less bite off the wicket. An offspinner's topspinner and arm ball are a lot more dangerous than the googly.
Even if you dont have a googly, don't worry about it too much.
 
Googly is the most overrated delivery in cricket ever! It is very easy to pick, difficult to disguise, too strenuous and on most occasions has a very different trajectory to the legbreak with much less bite off the wicket. An offspinner's topspinner and arm ball are a lot more dangerous than the googly.
Even if you dont have a googly, don't worry about it too much.

I'm with Shrek on this - The Googly is over-rated, keep at it, but don't ever get so determined, you spend more time bowling it than your Leg Break. If you have a Top-Spinner it should come eventually. Have you looked at the Googly version on youtube by the blokes at Question Cricket, that may help?
 
I'm with Shrek on this - The Googly is over-rated, keep at it, but don't ever get so determined, you spend more time bowling it than your Leg Break. If you have a Top-Spinner it should come eventually. Have you looked at the Googly version on youtube by the blokes at Question Cricket, that may help?

Yes I have, I know I can't try to bowl it too much but I haven't even been able to get it to spin the right way underarm as yet
 
Shrek# How is it overrated when it still gets wickets at the international level and bowlers like Tahir get most of their wickets from it?

I realize now why I wasn't getting it. When I was delivering the ball, the back of my palm was facing the batsmen rather than facing me.

I'm going out to do some practice :)
 
Shrek# How is it overrated when it still gets wickets at the international level and bowlers like Tahir get most of their wickets from it?

I realize now why I wasn't getting it. When I was delivering the ball, the back of my palm was facing the batsmen rather than facing me.

I'm going out to do some practice :)

Not too much with the Googly I hope - always go back to your leg break and check that it's still turning and working.
 
Shrek# How is it overrated when it still gets wickets at the international level and bowlers like Tahir get most of their wickets from it?

I realize now why I wasn't getting it. When I was delivering the ball, the back of my palm was facing the batsmen rather than facing me.

I'm going out to do some practice :)

Tahir gets most of his wickets from googlies and top spinners (lbw and so on). And most of his wickets are tailenders.

Anyway, the next part is from the point of view of a middle order batsman who has played a lot of spin bowling. Yes, you will get players who don't pay attention out. But, you don't need a googly to do that. You could have just as easily gotten them by a variation in the flight or length. More importantly, any batsman worth his salt will atleast try to look at the ball from the point of release onwards. Even if his calibre, eyesight, reactions vary a lot, googly and leg break can be told apart from each other because of
1. release - wrist moves 180 degrees from legbreak position. One has to be quite daft not to notice that, if he is in the team as a batsman
2. trajectory - a googly comes over top of your head, meaning it tends to be slightly loopier than legbreak. Even if you didnt pick up the release, trajectory should tell you something is off and sensible batsman will be wary
3. Seam- Unless you use scrambled seam for legbreak and googly, just by looking at the seam, you can tell its a googly (yes, good batsman are usually able to see the seam when the ball is in flight)

And, it is not just me, I believe Grimmett wasn't a fan of googlies either. Because, he always got too much bounce from it, so it was difficult to get an lbw. He settled on flippers instead.
 
Tahir gets most of his wickets from googlies and top spinners (lbw and so on). And most of his wickets are tailenders.

Anyway, the next part is from the point of view of a middle order batsman who has played a lot of spin bowling. Yes, you will get players who don't pay attention out. But, you don't need a googly to do that. You could have just as easily gotten them by a variation in the flight or length. More importantly, any batsman worth his salt will atleast try to look at the ball from the point of release onwards. Even if his calibre, eyesight, reactions vary a lot, googly and leg break can be told apart from each other because of
1. release - wrist moves 180 degrees from legbreak position. One has to be quite daft not to notice that, if he is in the team as a batsman
2. trajectory - a googly comes over top of your head, meaning it tends to be slightly loopier than legbreak. Even if you didnt pick up the release, trajectory should tell you something is off and sensible batsman will be wary
3. Seam- Unless you use scrambled seam for legbreak and googly, just by looking at the seam, you can tell its a googly (yes, good batsman are usually able to see the seam when the ball is in flight)

And, it is not just me, I believe Grimmett wasn't a fan of googlies either. Because, he always got too much bounce from it, so it was difficult to get an lbw. He settled on flippers instead.

A good argument, I'd still like to learn the delivery though. It'd be a good delivery to use against tail-enders or batsmen that don't watch the hand :p
 
Googly is the most overrated delivery in cricket ever! It is very easy to pick, difficult to disguise, too strenuous and on most occasions has a very different trajectory to the legbreak with much less bite off the wicket. An offspinner's topspinner and arm ball are a lot more dangerous than the googly.
Even if you dont have a googly, don't worry about it too much.

Have to say I disagree completely, I love my bosie, its the original variation and very valuable. The only problem with using it truly effectively is that both your action and your tactics have to be set up to utilise it as more than just a novelty or shock tactic. And you can't say it's easy to pick, has much less bite and is not dangerous after watching this! Bearing in mind this bloke is a complete genius.

 
Here's another exponent of the Wrong Un - my son Joe (The one with smashed leg see links below) but, because he has such a good wrong un, he doesn't have a Leg Break. Because he's no longer interested in Wrist Spin and mostly bowls seam up these days he's not fussed on the fact that he doesn't have a leg break and he just pulls the wrong un out on the odd occasion and gets wickets with it, thinking about it he might go on to be one of those blokes that can bowl it at speed in the longer run? I'd still advocate a lot of caution with regards learning it, because all of the evidence suggests that if you do focus on it too much (and that distinction of "Too much" is a very grey area) it will be to the detriment of your Leg Break. With regards the way in which it turns off the crease and the speed - when I bowled them 98% of the time with my Flippers as a variation mine turned as much as and more than Qadirs, but obviously a lot slower. I can't recall where I read it - it may have been Grimmett, but the action of the wrong un is a far more natural action suited to the bio-mechanics of the body, whereas the Leg Break is generally seen as a difficult delivery, so reverting to the wrong un as your primary delivery has a potentially negative affect on your Leg Break. All of the great wrist spinners advocate bowling and practicing the wrong un very sporadically amongst your leggies.​


You could go my way which I wouldn't advise - go at the wrong big and learn it and you'll get it and it'll be a beautiful delivery, but don't expect to be able to bowl a leggie (Unless you're a freak of nature) and then spend 3 years re-covering your leg break! You might be lucky and get it back a lot sooner.

Just be cautious with it.

http://www.mpafirsteleven.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/joes-progress-5-pictures.html
 
Hey guys, so to update, I've been practicing thanks for the help! I still need a lot of work, but I'm getting the hang of it. Out of 6 bowls, only 2 would end up as googly's which is much better then all of them ending up as googlys. I don't personally think the googly is overrated, as I can disguise it pretty well and completely fool the batsmen. As far as bowling the googly goes, It's pretty easy, but that's maybe because it's the first bowl I bowled.
 
I read something a short while back (Might have been Brian Wilkins)? that sounded like one of those really obvious things, but I thought it was also one of those things that isn't reinforced enough. Relating to bowling Leg Breaks and getting 'Side-on' and therefore helping to implement the rotation aspect of the bowling action... As your leading arm is raised just as you pull it down as a part of the classic 'Rudder' component of the delivery, you should find yourself looking over your left should outside of the leading (Rudder) arm NOT be looking under the arm - that would make you far too 'Front on' as opposed to the side on approach.
 
Actually I think googly is a very important delivery for a leggie, especially if you want to be successful against left handers. Against righthanders a slider is an effective replacement, but against lefties not so much. You really need a ball that will dip and turn away from them otherwise they're just going to hammer you through the legside all day long.
 
If you can be bothered to watch the bowler's hand very closely the wrong un is usually pretty easy pick imo.
 
Shrek# How is it overrated when it still gets wickets at the international level and bowlers like Tahir get most of their wickets from it?
Unless you happen to stumble into one, it's fantastically hard to bowl. There's something of a knack which is difficult to put any method to. But then even if you have it, controlling it is quite another matter. Putting it on the cut strip is not straightforward let alone a consistent good length. If you haven't got that length the delivery is a gift to the batsman.

Then even if you get that, as Bosanquet noted, it's simply an off-break produced by an extraordinary method. It's hardly unpickable.

If you do put in significant time attempting to master it (hardly anyone ever does) there is a very real risk you could lose your reliable stock ball, the leg break.

It could also possibly lead to shoulder trouble.

It's the reason I play cricket.
 
Unless you happen to stumble into one, it's fantastically hard to bowl. There's something of a knack which is difficult to put any method to. But then even if you have it, controlling it is quite another matter. Putting it on the cut strip is not straightforward let alone a consistent good length. If you haven't got that length the delivery is a gift to the batsman.

Then even if you get that, as Bosanquet noted, it's simply an off-break produced by an extraordinary method. It's hardly unpickable.

If you do put in significant time attempting to master it (hardly anyone ever does) there is a very real risk you could lose your reliable stock ball, the leg break.

It could also possibly lead to shoulder trouble.

It's the reason I play cricket.

Agreed. I've never been able to get it myself but I know people who it comes to reasonably easily. One of them can't bowl the leg break anymore as you said can happen. It seems leg spinners come in two forms; those who the googly comes easier to but rely on it as a stock ball and leg spinners who rely on the classic leg break and top spinner and find it very difficult to get the googly.

I still think there is a place for the googly in the game though. Greater turn and more variations is why a great leg spinner will always beat a great off spinner after-all. ;)
 
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