Wrist Spin Bowling (part Five)

ok, so you convinced me, seems to be some good info here. i'm primarily a leg spinner, but my batting is now at a level good enough that i consider myself to be an all rounder and i may open for my uni 2nds as an experiment by our society captain. hopefully i can help with input from both sides of the coin as you seem to be lacking input from batsmen and i may be able to help with what i know and what i've learned from my team mates. i also play for 2 teams, 1 uni and 1 club; both of which have very good batsmen and so i develop my bowling from what gives them trouble, i also have the benefit of bowling regularly with two leggies who are very good (and a few more who are inconsistent), but not too helpful with where i've gone wrong when i stray from bowling well.

Mike

Mike is it possible that you are bowling top spinners. When I first took up leg spin 18 months ago I couldnt get it to turn and it took me a long time to realise I was getting good spin on the ball, just my wrist was in a position at release to only bowl topspinners. It took massive exageration in my mind to get my wrist in the right position at release.
Do you play in Oz or England?
 
Oh yes, it works well for me, but my natural length is (very annoyingly) a sweeping length, and I've always been taught to have just one man out, a deep square leg, so that's how I've always done it haha. Yeah I often get a bit of pressure built up, but once every few overs I'm also liable to bowl a short one, normally because it comes badly out of the hand. If I had a better keeper behind the sticks I'd have even more pressure, but our keeper is only young (until our old hand comes back from knee surgery) so we'll have to see how that goes.

Good little blog mate, keep it up through the season.
 
ok, so you convinced me, seems to be some good info here. i'm primarily a leg spinner, but my batting is now at a level good enough that i consider myself to be an all rounder and i may open for my uni 2nds as an experiment by our society captain. hopefully i can help with input from both sides of the coin as you seem to be lacking input from batsmen and i may be able to help with what i know and what i've learned from my team mates. i also play for 2 teams, 1 uni and 1 club; both of which have very good batsmen and so i develop my bowling from what gives them trouble, i also have the benefit of bowling regularly with two leggies who are very good (and a few more who are inconsistent), but not too helpful with where i've gone wrong when i stray from bowling well.

Mike

How do you go batting against legspin ?
 
At the end of last season or even at the beginning of this one, if you had told me that we would change clubs and that my son would get picked as the legspinner for the 1sts at his new club and then win a premiership, well i cant say i wouldn't have believed it because that was our plan and dream but that it happened is all because of hard work and lots of overs.

He was picked as honourary captain for the last 6 games after his mum died, it was a nice touch from the coach and manager and even though all he did was toss the coin every week and maybe sledge the opposition even more than he does normally, he can always say he captained a premiership side.

I know he is the best spinner in his comp, but it is good to hear other people say so. He was having a bowl a few weeks ago and some joker yells out " hey warnie, where's liz ? "spin king" is another one he gets.

Well they aint seen nothing yet. Next season he is going to coming back stronger and better than ever, he will have to, so as to keep his spot in this very strong team. We let his batting and fielding go unpractised a bit in favour of his bowling towards the end of season so we will be working on that a bit over winter. He has to open his stance because he misses too much legside shots and as for fielding he has to work on getting in the slips.

He bowls 75% legbreaks and 25% topspinners and straight ones in matches, sometimes 95% legbreaks but next year if he can get another yard on his wrongun and even get his flipper good enough for matches then he might get a bit more variation in his bowling. Not too much variation though, just a tiny fraction at key points.

He still has to play some games for his school cricket team so the season isn't quite over yet but we will get a break soon, we need it because it has been a long ,long, hot summer.
 
How do you go batting against legspin ?

I'm RH bat and it depends, i'm quite susceptible at the start of my session but i'm quite quick to get in. depending on who's bowling at me i play differently, if the bowlers turning it a lot i try to either get to the pitch of the ball by going down the wicket if its on a good length to go over the bowlers head, or if its short i sit back and cut and play it late. im strong on my off side so i usually prefer manoeuvring the ball there, and i do little touches depending on what the ball looks like. if the balls coming in on a leg stump line i'm trying to get a good stride in to forward defence, but im thinking about dancing down and make an effort to constantly keep my feet moving and not rooted which helps against spinners in general. i'm also working on leg side shots atm, just need to keep getting in my practice.

when i bowl against my RH captain, i find that on the leg stump line he's very good at sweeping me so when i bowl i think about that, though a lot of people i bowl against try a defensive shot and i turn it past them or they block successfully.

Mike is it possible that you are bowling top spinners. When I first took up leg spin 18 months ago I couldnt get it to turn and it took me a long time to realise I was getting good spin on the ball, just my wrist was in a position at release to only bowl topspinners. It took massive exageration in my mind to get my wrist in the right position at release.
Do you play in Oz or England?

thats what i have been thinking, i will have a look and see at nets tonight, i think by the end of my session thats what im doing as i just get knackered and start bowling lazily.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lnPdotmVkU&feature=related shows at 2.40 benaud talking about how the ball is forced out spinning around its own axis and skids on...
Although I’ve watched the Benaud vids (I think these are the ones Golden Arm ripped and uploaded) the description of Benuads Flipper kind of passed me by, but having looked at it again I can now see that it has some merit in that his approach is quite unlike anyone else’s. The back-spinning Flipper I’ve always seen as being useful in that it lands on the seam giving it some grip potentially and causing the ball to lose pace possibly. It’s never crossed my mind to try and bowl it as described with a ‘Flying saucer’ approach, so that the ball lands on the smooth surface of the ball. But as Mike says below, landing on the smooth surface potentially means the ball is going to skid through more readily? So just this variation of the Flipper seems to be worth looking at to see how it goes?



I also bowl the backspinning flipper but it comes out as a faster darty delivery for me instead of what i want which is a flighted skiddy ball, hopefully if i get the benaud one sorted 100% it will be what im looking for in my variations.

This idea then takes the ‘Flying Saucer’ Flipper a step further in that it could be explored as a normal speed delivery to ascertain whether it would still ‘Skid through’ with less pace. This sounds more like the affect you’d probably get with an Orthodox Back Spinner or one of the other more obscure back-spinners, maybe the cross-seamed slider, with the built in variation of ball hitting or not hitting the seam.

I mentioned the flying saucer delivery ages and ages ago, probably 18 months ago. At that time I hadn't seen the Benaud video about the "flying saucer" flipper, and I'm not convinced Benaud bowled it this way at all. But it has merit as a ball that skids through, I drew comparisons with Lasith Malinga as this is how he delivers the cricket ball quite often with his slingy pace action. Its extremely hard to bowl though, and I gave up on it because I couldn't get it consistent (not just in terms of where it landed, but I couldn't even get the seam out this way most of the time), and I don't see much merit for it as a variation.

However this method, whilst in your theory above may seem like a better way to bowl the genuine flipper, since the seam won't grip, sort of misses the whole point of the flipper delivery and why it is so effective....

The flipper is a delivery that leaves the hand with the batsman thinking "it looks like a leg break, but its got no flight, so it must be a drag down, I should play this off the back foot". Then before he knows it, the ball is faster, has carried through full (due to the magnus effect causing it to carry further in flight) and rapped him halfway up his pads on middle stump, or even worse clean bowled him, and he has no idea how.

The only way to achieve that deception is in flight, because off the pitch there a) isn't enough distance for the ball to do anything like that between pitching and reaching the bat, and b) it won't be able to suddenly lose bounce from trajectory, at best it might skid through maybe 1-2mph faster than it otherwise would have, but that isn't getting you a wicket. So you can't flight it up or it just doesn't work, the deception is in length and length only.

The flipper has to be hard backspun, and it doesn't much matter where the seam is or how it is rotating for the purposes of this, and that causes it to carry further in flight than it otherwise should (bearing in mind the batsman is expecting a long-hop leg break from the action). The bounce off the wicket makes little difference (it doesn't need to stay that low) since its LBW or bowled you're looking for, so it only needs to stay low enough to hit the stumps. If it lands on the seam then it will stay lower, but if it lands off seam then it will skid through slightly quicker. Either way the batsman is in trouble if he has played for a short delivery! It really doesn't matter if you bowl upright seam or scrambled seam in this regard.

The upright seam however has another useful purpose, in that it will swing like mad! I've got flippers to swing literally the width of the wicket at fairly low speeds, so much so that they can start on a leg stump line and end up being horrendous wides!! If you get the ball to drift/swing in (bearing in mind it still needs to hit the stumps for LBW or bowled to come into play, so you don't want too much) then you've got even more chance of beating the bat. And also the seam angle to achieve this will result in a little bit of leg break off the pitch as well, so it can drift in from off stump to middle and then straighten up slightly to get you an absolute plum LBW shout.

If you work on it a bit then you can also create the off-spinning flipper, and have 2 flippers that look absolutely identical (sometimes I can't even tell you which way its coming out until I see which way it turns as the difference in seam angle is that subtle!) but can turn slightly one way or the other off the pitch depending on which way the seam points (unless you get it dead straight in which case it won't break at all, but that is rare). So even if the batsman can pick your flipper, he can't possibly pick which of the 3 it is (straight, leg break, off break), and that subtle turn (probably 2-3 inches) is all it takes to find or beat the edge. My off-spinning flipper is causing everyone big problems in indoor nets at the moment :D Its a great variation to have.
 
I mentioned the flying saucer delivery ages and ages ago, probably 18 months ago. At that time I hadn't seen the Benaud video about the "flying saucer" flipper, and I'm not convinced Benaud bowled it this way at all. But it has merit as a ball that skids through, I drew comparisons with Lasith Malinga as this is how he delivers the cricket ball quite often with his slingy pace action. Its extremely hard to bowl though, and I gave up on it because I couldn't get it consistent (not just in terms of where it landed, but I couldn't even get the seam out this way most of the time), and I don't see much merit for it as a variation.

However this method, whilst in your theory above may seem like a better way to bowl the genuine flipper, since the seam won't grip, sort of misses the whole point of the flipper delivery and why it is so effective....

The flipper is a delivery that leaves the hand with the batsman thinking "it looks like a leg break, but its got no flight, so it must be a drag down, I should play this off the back foot". Then before he knows it, the ball is faster, has carried through full (due to the magnus effect causing it to carry further in flight) and rapped him halfway up his pads on middle stump, or even worse clean bowled him, and he has no idea how.

The only way to achieve that deception is in flight, because off the pitch there a) isn't enough distance for the ball to do anything like that between pitching and reaching the bat, and b) it won't be able to suddenly lose bounce from trajectory, at best it might skid through maybe 1-2mph faster than it otherwise would have, but that isn't getting you a wicket. So you can't flight it up or it just doesn't work, the deception is in length and length only.

The flipper has to be hard backspun, and it doesn't much matter where the seam is or how it is rotating for the purposes of this, and that causes it to carry further in flight than it otherwise should (bearing in mind the batsman is expecting a long-hop leg break from the action). The bounce off the wicket makes little difference (it doesn't need to stay that low) since its LBW or bowled you're looking for, so it only needs to stay low enough to hit the stumps. If it lands on the seam then it will stay lower, but if it lands off seam then it will skid through slightly quicker. Either way the batsman is in trouble if he has played for a short delivery! It really doesn't matter if you bowl upright seam or scrambled seam in this regard.

The upright seam however has another useful purpose, in that it will swing like mad! I've got flippers to swing literally the width of the wicket at fairly low speeds, so much so that they can start on a leg stump line and end up being horrendous wides!! If you get the ball to drift/swing in (bearing in mind it still needs to hit the stumps for LBW or bowled to come into play, so you don't want too much) then you've got even more chance of beating the bat. And also the seam angle to achieve this will result in a little bit of leg break off the pitch as well, so it can drift in from off stump to middle and then straighten up slightly to get you an absolute plum LBW shout.

If you work on it a bit then you can also create the off-spinning flipper, and have 2 flippers that look absolutely identical (sometimes I can't even tell you which way its coming out until I see which way it turns as the difference in seam angle is that subtle!) but can turn slightly one way or the other off the pitch depending on which way the seam points (unless you get it dead straight in which case it won't break at all, but that is rare). So even if the batsman can pick your flipper, he can't possibly pick which of the 3 it is (straight, leg break, off break), and that subtle turn (probably 2-3 inches) is all it takes to find or beat the edge. My off-spinning flipper is causing everyone big problems in indoor nets at the moment :D Its a great variation to have.

The amount of swing on an upright seamed backspun flipper is crazy sometimes, just like jim describes.

Makes nonsense of Bradmans claim in 'art of cricket', in his chapter on spin bowling, that no bowler can apply enough backspin to swerve a ball. He talks about backspin in golf and tennis ball behaviour and then goes on to say you cant backspin a cricket ball enough to use backspin in spin bowling!

grimmett was in the same club, state and national teams as bradman when he was developing his flippers yet the greatest ball player in history didn't detect backspin?

just shows that grimmett kept bradman in the dark and also , like grimmett wrote himself, he hardly ever bowled the backspinning flipper until his last season but preferred to bowl it as the overspinner, upside down to the backspun flipper.
 
now the season is all but over we get to use the no2 turf wicket here over the next few weeks. we checked it out last night and it is pretty good. should spin like mad by the looks of it. cricket is a pretty cheap sport, you can use public nets and disused pitches for free :D
 
The amount of swing on an upright seamed backspun flipper is crazy sometimes, just like jim describes.

Makes nonsense of Bradmans claim in 'art of cricket', in his chapter on spin bowling, that no bowler can apply enough backspin to swerve a ball. He talks about backspin in golf and tennis ball behaviour and then goes on to say you cant backspin a cricket ball enough to use backspin in spin bowling!

grimmett was in the same club, state and national teams as bradman when he was developing his flippers yet the greatest ball player in history didn't detect backspin?

just shows that grimmett kept bradman in the dark and also , like grimmett wrote himself, he hardly ever bowled the backspinning flipper until his last season but preferred to bowl it as the overspinner, upside down to the backspun flipper.

I knew someone had mentioned the Flying saucer Idea before and yeah I remember now with the Malinga reference. Yeah I'm onboard with Jim's backs-spinning conventional flipper and its swing. Last year I'd thought I'd lost the ability to bowl the back-spinner as it was ending up 3' wide of the Leg Stump although I was pitching it on off-stump. I kept at it and then some days or sessions it was as right as rain and then I realised that the ones that were going wide were at certain venues at certain times of day and I thought - could it be that the ball is swinging? Next time it happened it looked closer and sure enough the ball started out okay, but then swung early with the swing diminishing towards the last 3rd of the trajectory and as Jim has observed you have to do something along the lines of bowl as though it's going to pitch 2.5' - 3' wide of off for it to land around the stumps. But in my experience this only happens when the air is moist on fields are closed in by trees (*The Trent Bridge affect).

* I think it's Trent Bridge that has been noted to produce more swing on muggy days and as the ground has been increasingly developed the swing has increased?
 
now the season is all but over we get to use the no2 turf wicket here over the next few weeks. we checked it out last night and it is pretty good. should spin like mad by the looks of it. cricket is a pretty cheap sport, you can use public nets and disused pitches for free :D

Totally disused or just waiting to be repaired?
 
(*The Trent Bridge affect).

* I think it's Trent Bridge that has been noted to produce more swing on muggy days and as the ground has been increasingly developed the swing has increased?
Yup, the new stand has changed the wind direction, resistance and some other stuff which is well over my head. It does, however, hoop round corners, having been there and watched the Nottinghamshire seamers bowl!
 
Yup, the new stand has changed the wind direction, resistance and some other stuff which is well over my head. It does, however, hoop round corners, having been there and watched the Nottinghamshire seamers bowl!

Phew - I got that right, maybe my cricket knowledge is improving!
 
The amount of swing on an upright seamed backspun flipper is crazy sometimes, just like jim describes.

Makes nonsense of Bradmans claim in 'art of cricket', in his chapter on spin bowling, that no bowler can apply enough backspin to swerve a ball. He talks about backspin in golf and tennis ball behaviour and then goes on to say you cant backspin a cricket ball enough to use backspin in spin bowling!

grimmett was in the same club, state and national teams as bradman when he was developing his flippers yet the greatest ball player in history didn't detect backspin?

just shows that grimmett kept bradman in the dark and also , like grimmett wrote himself, he hardly ever bowled the backspinning flipper until his last season but preferred to bowl it as the overspinner, upside down to the backspun flipper.

It makes sense that it should swing as all good swing bowlers drag their fingers down behind the ball to get a little bit of back spin on the ball. Not sure why back spin equals sideways movement though, just on of the vaguaries of cricket.
 
Totally disused or just waiting to be repaired?

just not in use and let go for 6 months, 3 pitches on the square and they get one roll and one mow a week in season but nothing now for a few months.

Brand new nets going up close to home as well, these look good and spinner friendly in that they haven't got the cross piece on the roof too close to bowlers end.
 
just not in use and let go for 6 months, 3 pitches on the square and they get one roll and one mow a week in season but nothing now for a few months.

Brand new nets going up close to home as well, these look good and spinner friendly in that they haven't got the cross piece on the roof too close to bowlers end.

Do you remember at the start of our season I christened a new synthetic pitch at the nets. It didnt turn at all to begin with. Now 6 months later it turns a mile and gets huge bounce. Of course synthetic isn't comparable to turf but over this season I have found a new appreciation for synthetic wickets and their different characteristics. If they could somehow produce a synthetic pitch that didn't have such tennis ball style bounce theyd be on a winner. When I bowl my leggies on a good length they will always bounce over the stumps.
 
Our League has all 6 grades grand finals on the same reserve. I was looking forward to going down this afternoon with our team, a few beers and a deck chair and watching our 5ths and 6ths play there grand final and see our 2nds grand final. Unfortunately it rained 4 Inches on saturday and it has been torrential all morning today so its all off and the team that finished highest on the table takes the prize. Thats right of course but not the same feeling for the sides as winning on the last day.
Im dissappointed I cant get down the nets with the video camera either now til next weekend.
 
just not in use and let go for 6 months, 3 pitches on the square and they get one roll and one mow a week in season but nothing now for a few months.

Brand new nets going up close to home as well, these look good and spinner friendly in that they haven't got the cross piece on the roof too close to bowlers end.

I hate those types of net, but they do seem to be the most common type.
 
on the subject of nets, I went down and helped with the groundwork yesterday at my club and as a result got to put the net back up! the weather was fantastic, felt more like July than mid-March, so a couple of hours later after some lunch I was back down there for the first practice of the season :D got a couple of hours in, it was sort of productive, but not great.

the net surface is all covered in moss and was still pretty damp. literally the worse possible condition for leg spin bowling, and at first the ball was just skidding on and doing absolutely nothing, and I was thinking it was going to be one of those days. I span the ball out of my hand and just let it drop onto the surface, and even then it hardly moved! and it was really skiddy, even my slow medium pace seam up deliveries were knocking the stumps over!! so much so that I thought I must be in the high 60's minimum, but video suggests an average speed from release to stumps of 46mph, so I'm low 50's at best.

anyhow, I got on with it. started out bowling off the 1 step method and it was utterly awful. for some reason I am completely incapable of staying upright and/or rotating over my front foot. I literally couldn't do it, I have no idea why. it probably didn't help that I had spent 2 hours doing groundwork, dragging various heavy contraptions about by a piece of rope so my hands were tight and my arms were aching before I started. not sure if thats it or not though, but I didn't have a problem with the 1 step drill a few months back.

so I gave up on that after a while because it clearly wasn't helping. I played around with my run up and approach, and I'm constantly over-pitching, which at my clubs net means putting the ball on the roof all the time because its far too low! I figured I needed to get my weight forwards, but that killed my rhythm. so I started running in leaning forwards (which after I realised it worked I remembered was one of the key things I did at the end of last season when I got my action working awesomely) and that helped, I started remembering little bits about what had worked at the start of off-season and eventually I started hooking things up a bit. bowling reasonable pace, pitching on leg, turning past off, with decent consistency.

then I decided I needed to setup the video camera, which wasnt my proper one, just a GoPro clamped to middle stump on 60fps mode (so still very capable of slow motion), and after that I didn't really bowl another great delivery all afternoon haha! I need to watch the video back to see if there are any at all, I think there might be 2, but it wasn't very productive. there won't be any video going online.

It isn't light enough in the evenings (plus the sun sets behind the nets) so I think outdoor nets are weekends only at present (weather pending), maybe an occasional afternoon if I can find time. my action has a LONG way to go though if its going to be consistent for the start of the season, which is probably about 3-4 weeks now.
 
on the subject of nets, I went down and helped with the groundwork yesterday at my club and as a result got to put the net back up! the weather was fantastic, felt more like July than mid-March, so a couple of hours later after some lunch I was back down there for the first practice of the season :D got a couple of hours in, it was sort of productive, but not great.

the net surface is all covered in moss and was still pretty damp. literally the worse possible condition for leg spin bowling, and at first the ball was just skidding on and doing absolutely nothing, and I was thinking it was going to be one of those days. I span the ball out of my hand and just let it drop onto the surface, and even then it hardly moved! and it was really skiddy, even my slow medium pace seam up deliveries were knocking the stumps over!! so much so that I thought I must be in the high 60's minimum, but video suggests an average speed from release to stumps of 46mph, so I'm low 50's at best.

anyhow, I got on with it. started out bowling off the 1 step method and it was utterly awful. for some reason I am completely incapable of staying upright and/or rotating over my front foot. I literally couldn't do it, I have no idea why. it probably didn't help that I had spent 2 hours doing groundwork, dragging various heavy contraptions about by a piece of rope so my hands were tight and my arms were aching before I started. not sure if thats it or not though, but I didn't have a problem with the 1 step drill a few months back.

so I gave up on that after a while because it clearly wasn't helping. I played around with my run up and approach, and I'm constantly over-pitching, which at my clubs net means putting the ball on the roof all the time because its far too low! I figured I needed to get my weight forwards, but that killed my rhythm. so I started running in leaning forwards (which after I realised it worked I remembered was one of the key things I did at the end of last season when I got my action working awesomely) and that helped, I started remembering little bits about what had worked at the start of off-season and eventually I started hooking things up a bit. bowling reasonable pace, pitching on leg, turning past off, with decent consistency.

then I decided I needed to setup the video camera, which wasnt my proper one, just a GoPro clamped to middle stump on 60fps mode (so still very capable of slow motion), and after that I didn't really bowl another great delivery all afternoon haha! I need to watch the video back to see if there are any at all, I think there might be 2, but it wasn't very productive. there won't be any video going online.

It isn't light enough in the evenings (plus the sun sets behind the nets) so I think outdoor nets are weekends only at present (weather pending), maybe an occasional afternoon if I can find time. my action has a LONG way to go though if its going to be consistent for the start of the season, which is probably about 3-4 weeks now.

I have some nets near me that stay wet for days after rain and you cant really tell how your bowling. Its quite frustrating because they just skid on and I reckon you really need the feedback to know how your going.
Its unfortunate that you can't get down the nets more often. I have found that getting down there at least once every two days and sometimes 6 days a week has been the biggest help in my action improving. I found when I only got down there once a week or so it was exactly as you said, you forget bits and remember bits that worked last time and by the end of the session you've only got back to where you were last time at best and haven't really improved.
Its funny how you can bowl your best deliveries consistently and then you put the camera on and they start going everywhere. Happens to me all the time.
 
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