The Knuckle Ball

Shivam_ipl

Member
well i am not getting it.i have read blogs from dave still didnt get it.can anyone elaborate it.the knuckle curve too.thanks if anyone can tell......:mad:
 
The knuckleball is a way of throwing a baseball with extremely slow spin in such a way that it wobbles up to an inch in random directions on the way to the batter. It doesn't work in cricket because:
a) a cricket bat is wider than a baseball and mishitting the ball by an inch will still probably go for four, whereas in baseball an inch difference could make the ball go straight up in the air.
b) it only works if it is a full toss. Slow fulltosses tend to get hit for six, even slow knuckleball fulltosses

Cricketers have known about it for years, there is a very good reason why no-one actually bowls it.

The knucklecurve is just a curve ball (ie topspinner) with a particular grip. Its unrelated.
 
it won't actually do anything with a cricket ball though, if you do release it right with a cricket ball it will come out with no spin. The seam is straight on a cricket ball on a baseball(or tennis ball) the seam is not straight this is the reason that the knuckleball moves- due to the curved seam of the ball. You could argue there is some merit to bowling a ball with no spin on as a variation as it will behave differently to a topspinner or backspinner but probablly not as the grip is fairly easy to pick up for a batsman anyway.
 
Yeah it's pretty much a non starter in cricket because of the reasons above, as Gundalf says you might try it as a variation against tail enders, but the seam issue pretty much means it doesn't do what it's supposed to do and even if it did, the points that SLA makes mean that it's pretty much a pointless ball.
 
Zaheer Khan bowls a knuckle ball as a type of slower ball. The idea of using it in cricket is actually to put some spin on it. He bowls his with a little leg spin on it so it nips into the right handed batsman. I have tried using it as a spin variation, it's not really worth it but has an interesting effect. It reverses the type of spin from every hand position. The one I tried was out of the back of the hand so the batsman thinks it's a top spinning delivery. But it had backspin, which could potentionally fool the batsman. Don't think it's worth using as a variation though.
 
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