Wrist Spin Bowling

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Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Concentration

In his book Peter Philpott mentions this several times. He says in order that you have an affective practice your concentration needs to be 100% focussed on the task. He goes on and takes it further saying that if you're not fully focussed you may as well not bother. I had a session tonight, probably the last one on grass for a while where my attention was side-tracked......

(From the blog Wrist Spin Bowling)

Prior to starting this session something occured on the field with the other users of the field that stopped me from being able to focus on the task at hand. So not being able to focus 100% as advised by Peter Philpott the session was nowhere near as productive as the one on Saturday. I suppose I should be happy because the majority of the balls were either straight or small Leg Breaks with the rare one that I did manage to rip properly and they obviously turned wider. What I did notice was that in the 90 or so balls that I did throw several of them did the thing that I hear so many people talking about - I dragged it down trying really hard to impart the spin. After doing this a few times I stood back and took stock of what I was doing and it was the fact that I wasn't concentrating. I wasn't leading with the high arm, I wasn't following through with step over action and none of it was relaxed, as soon as I adopted this approach all aspects came together - line, length and spin, but it does require the total concentration. So all in all despite being nowhere near as good as the Saturday experience - I was bowling Leg Breaks - 80% of them turned albeit in a very small way, but this is only Oct 1st and I've got all of Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb and March to get it right, so I just need to be patient.

Does anyone else advocate this level of focus on the task? It may be something you need to look at and adopt as part of your overall strategy when practicing and playing? If you are struggling are you taking it seriously or are you just expecting it to simply happen with little or no mental effort?
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Hey dave, just wondering if you caught this quote on cricinfo

"It's my stock ball. I always try to bowl the wrong 'un."
Click to expand...
Legspinner Piyush Chawla says his usual delivery spins from off towards leg
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Oct 4, 2008
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And hes an international class spinner. Maybe you're not alone with your googly syndrome.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

That's interesting. I've just had a really frustrating 1/2 hour out on the field trying to bowl Leg Breaks. Some of them did turn but it's not coming easy at all, but then I didn't expect it too. It'd be interesting to hear what some of the other blokes on here with a lot more cricket experience say about this? I'll look him up now and see why it is that he bowls googly's as his stock ball?

Cheers for drawing this to my attention.

Dave
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

I had a quick look and found this on cricinfo website -

Cricinfo - Players and Officials - Piyush Chawla

It sounds pretty impressive but also says that he has wonderful control of his variations. It could be that his killer ball is the googly as there seems to be loads of accounts of him taking wickets with the googly but all the indications I've found suggest he's a Leg Break bowler? Brokenleg - where did you get your quotes from? I'd like to find out more about this bloke? I can imagine that if he has the leg break and it's not a big leg break and he bowls it threatening the off stump - would imagine the googly out of nowhere and a good un would be very affective?

I've also come across this - http://www.itsonlycricket.com/entry/253/

This also sort of suggests he possibly bowls the Top Spinner and the Leg Break. It just seems unfathomable that he'd bowl the googly all the time? But I'm willing to look at any evidence. I can see that a bowler would bowl both the straight one and the Leg Break as their main balls and then use a big turning googly to take the wickets?
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

chawala reminds me a lot of mushtaq ahmed. mushtaqs stock ball used to be the leg spinner until he developed his googly. slowly but surely his leg spinner turned less and less and slowly his stock ball became the googly. thats the problem with bowling wrong uns. your body slowly gets a custom to it and it causes you to " forget" your leg break. although mushtaq reinvented himself by throwing huge googlies ( they spin as much as offbreaks ) mixed with top spinners and little leg breaks, it allowed him to continue taking a bag of wickets. funnily enough terry jenners ( shanes warnes mentor ) also suffered from the googly syndrome. in his playing days, his stock ball was also the googly. ( his leg spinner didnt spin half and much as it does now ) this is why he warns us about throwing too much googlies in his coaching videos.
im still having trouble getting my deliveries to spin away :( its driving me nuts. can someone who has sharp leg breaks please send me a video of there bowling.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

At last people acknowledging the Googly syndrome and coming up with real life references to it. I like the point you make about the fact that your body becomes accustomed to it. I keep trying to think of analogies to get the point across about how potentially damaging learning the googly is and how important it is to not to learn it to the detriment of your Leg Break. I've said this before plenty of times (and I'm getting the impression from Bills previous post mentioning all the international players that have gone through this, that this is a common phenomenon) already you have got to be really careful. Thinking about it all my own teams Wrist spin bowlers bowl Leg Breaks and none of them bowl both the Leg Break and the Googly - they all watch in awe when I bowl googly's because I can and I'm the only one. But bowling googly's requires such a massively different physical approach to something that looks very similar that if you do it too much it kind of re-wires your brain. Your brain has to tell your body to do something that just feels alien in comparison to your Leg Break. The Leg Break is difficult enough, but it kind of makes sense and your body doesn't feel like it's being forced to do something which is wholly wrong. The Googly on the other hand just feels totally wrong and the learning process requires such a vast amount of what seems like contradictory information relating to the physical and conceptual theory behind it, that if practiced with commitment results in your body and brain accepting what felt wrong suddenly coming together as being right. The result then being that when you return to bowling the Leg Break you're then asking your body to do something that now seems to feel as the googly did - completely wrong. I don't know why - maybe it's got something to do with different parts of your brain controlling either action?

I had another practice tonight under floodlights at the skatepark and it went okay - as long as I accept that having spent half an hour bowling none of the balls turned to the right. They were mostly straight or very small Leg Breaks. The most positive aspects were that the top-spinners did go straight and not turn like small googly's which is a normal feature of my Top Spinners. Then with a slight adjustment of the wrist they did turn like very small leg breaks. The other positives were my line and length - these are very much under control. I bowled a few flippers as well and these were very good.

Bill during the periods when I could bowl Leg Breaks I used to follow Peter Philpotts round the clock theory. I have gone through phases when I have been able to bowl big turning leg breaks and I used Philpotts Spin the ball backwards/inwards technique doing this makes the ball turn big. I've tried to explain this on here before and a lot of people don't get it and think I'm talking out my backside. Get the book and read it, it does make sense.

Dave
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

October 6th Session No.5 my battle against the Googly syndrome

Half hour on the field with single stumps at each end 8 of my white balls. Back and forth usual story. Very very frustrating. If I really try at the moment I get the ball to go straight, sometimes the fingers manage to drag across the ball and some extra spin occurs to make the ball act like a small leg break. But generally at the moment it isn't happening. If I relax or lose concentration the ball turns into a googly. Perhaps I'm doing too much? What I may need to do is as said at the very beginning and what I tell other people to do is to follow Philpotts advice and start at the very beginning? I'm not going to be able to do anything in the next couple of days and my next early night coming home from work will be Wednesday, so maybe I'll try once more on flat ground using Hockey balls and see how that works and if I don't get a result I'll start back at the beginning because tonight was awful.

from Wrist Spin Bowling: Diary
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Davey! I might of asked this before, but do you have a fast ball? My mate has one, and it's easy to pick up but hard to score against in a way.

You're not long with your Googly syndrome, as brokenleg said. Cam White is also a RA Googly bowler. Do you feel your googly gets most of your wickets?
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

My faster ball is the flipper, but I'm kind of nervous about bowling it, I usually have to bowl a few lofty ones - a lot slower to get into the groove with it before I can then bowl the faster one, by which time the batsman has realised that they're bouncing in a lot lower with backspin so I then lose the element of surprise.

Yeah it's the googly that gets them but to have both the googly and the Leg Break has got to be your goal. I get the impression that all the other blokes in my team that bowl leggies take more wickets primarily by forcing errors - with the ball going away from them they just seem to produce more balls that come off the edge of the bat and get picked up by the fielders on the offside?

What are you like at batting - how do you feel and what causes you the most problems when you're facing spin? (This might be an idea for another thread)?

I'm off now to see if I can bowl some Leg Breaks. I'll report back soon.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Googly Syndrome news AKA I can't bowl leg breaks

I've just had 30 minutes on the field - lovely autumn weather here in the UK 18 degrees sunny and dewy. Initially it was the same old story - no matter what I did the balls were spinning off and I was confronted with the image of a pile of balls all on the wrong side of the stumps as I walked up the other end to start again. Did this a few times and realised I wasn't going to get anywhere. The most promising glimmer of hope was that when I tried to bowl Top Spinners they weren't going so far off and I kind of felt that if I just twisted my wrist so that the face of my hand was what the bat would see that might help. Again this just feels totally alien and wrong to me because of the www.thegooglysydrome.blogspot.com but everything I read tells me this is what I need to do. A couple of these did then spin to the legside marginally but they were massively wide and I was descending into a state of despair again. I walked from one end to the other to gather the balls again for a final frustrating 8 more attempts and as I did I thought - 'What if I bowl the ball and just simply try not to spin it anyway - top, off or leg. Just a straight non spinning ball using the Wrist spinners grip'? I summised that if I could do that and then get all the other components sorted first - line, length, flight etc I'd be not bowling googly's and therefore slowly conditioning my brain, wrist and arm to go back to year 0 when I started all this lark and that seems as though I may have a chance of learning this bloody Leg Break lark? It seemed like a plan?

Poised at the other end now with 8 balls and the idea of bowling a straight non-spinning ball but using the leg break grip I went for it and guess what happened? It spun off to off. And then again and again and again and again. All 8 balls ended up on the off side of the stump as I looked down the wicket! You don't know how good that felt and some of them had hit the single stump and some of them had pitched legside and spun towards off - but they all ended up on the off side.

So it looks as though in the short term I've found a solution - Don't try and spin it! I think I've said this before that if you hold the ball in the right manner and throw it most people have a tendency to produce Leg Breaks in a rough and ready way fairly easily hence little kids can do it quite often as with my son Joe.

So this looks promising?
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Seems a good plan Dave. If you think about it - a ball that spins but is on a crap line or length isn't dangerous and will probably get tonked. And a ball that doesn't spin but pitches in the right place is dangerous and probably will be defended. I remember you came across an old guy before that ran through your team with non-spinners? So if you can master the line and length, and add more spin gradually you're giving yourself the best chance to take wickets and not go for runs. Once you're fairly happy with the control start putting the revs on again.
Glad to hear it's going well - I suppose the fact that it turns to off when you aren't trying to turn it means your natural action with the right grip is a legspin action.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Yeah that seems like the plan and yeah you're right Sept 2007 the old bloke who was older than me had both our openers pinned down and scoring absolutely nothing bowling what looked like straight balls seemingly just using flight, speed and length variation. He bowled something like 10 - 12 overs and had 7 maidens or something - amazing!

As it happens I've just had another session in the dark under floodlights - not as good as this morning but I was using the Hockey balls on concrete. They seemed to be coming out mainly straight, several were going the right way and one or two that should have gone straight were slight off spinners. I'm putting it down to the fact that there isn't a seam and I wasn't quite in the same concentration zone. But it wasn't offspin after offspin and for that I'm thankful!
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

hi dave nice to hear that your at least beginning to get somewhere with your leg break, have you thought of using video analysis of your own bowling. I've been videoing my own bowling for a couple of months now to see why I bowl bad some days and better on others and it seems to help loads
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Gundalf - I would but I haven't got the technology to turn DV tape into something more accessible. I've got a crappy little video but the quality is so poor it's not worth using. The good news is we're getting a Canon G9 which has got an amazing video capacity which is saved to CF card as MPEG files. Hopefully this will be easier to view and possibly reduce in size to upload to youtube? But that wont be till Christmas.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

someblokecalleddave;270586 said:
What are you like at batting - how do you feel and what causes you the most problems when you're facing spin? (This might be an idea for another thread)?
Click to expand...

Everything causes me problems when I'm batting! I need to remind myself to watch the hand more because I never pick the wrong un. Sometimes I accidentally go on the back foot to pitched up balls but I do that to every bowler, but I think I'm slowly getting over it. I think I've just go to learn to wait for the ball and play more drop and run shots rather than trying to smash everything and end up hitting it straight to a fielder.


Ha, Dave, I've got a Canon G9! It's a beauty. You can do heaps of stuff with it, it's great.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Great going Dave,
I would suggest u practice "Spot Bowling" more often and judge ur line and length.
If u have trouble in getting ur line perfect.
I would suggest that first u just stand and deliver it from the bowling crease.As u will get judge about ur accuracy.
Then u can bowl with ur natural speed.
Mark a spot with some paper or anything u can see it clearly at the good lenght area.
Imagine a batsmen standing and by looking at the batsmen's feet bowl ur leg spin deliveries.
Best of Luck and keep us posted.

Virender
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Cheers Virender, I'll do this in the next session. I noticed something tonight relating to what I'm doing here. At the moment what with my googly feeling like my natural ball and the Leg Break feeling like the wrong one I kind of checked to see if I could still bowl a Googly and whether it felt any different? Read on.....

October 10th Session No.8

The nice weather continues but the night draws in too fast now to really get out on the field for any length of time, so I was pleased to be asked to go and get something from Michelle's freinds house realising that round the corner from her house was one of the new style basket ball courts with the vandal proof fencing. I'd used this one once or twice last year and new that it had a nice smooth and flat tarmac surface but wasn't sure whether there was any floodlighting? When I got there I was pleased to find that it did have a floodlight and that it's more or less perfect for my practice sessions, so offers another venue for practice.

Straight away from the first ball I bowled Leg Breaks and they weren't bad either. I went through a phase during the half hour when the accuracy and length got really good but seemingly at the expense of the turn, but realising that I was losing the turn slightly I focused again on bowling striaght and the turn came back.

At one point the Old Bill turned up and had a chat and one of them used to play when he was a kid and I was explaining that I was trying to bowl Leg Breaks as my natrual action had become Googly's. I then showed him what a Googly was and for the first time in nearly 2 weeks I threw a ball that came out of the back of my hand and oh my God how natural and easy it felt as though that was what I was born to do! So what with almost 2 weeks of bowling Leg breaks it's obvious that my brain as yet has been re-wired so that the Googly feels like the wrong one. It's obvious that I need to keep bowling the leg break and that it is going to take months for the Leg Break to feel like the right one and for the Googly to feel like the wrong one!
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

hello peeps, Now that cricket season is over, I've finnaly learnt to bowl the googly lol, After hours of backyard tape ball cricket. I found out that i was rotating my wrist too much thats why i coulden't bowl the googly before, So with a more eased wrist i can finnaly spin it the other way. Anyways, now that i can bowl a googly with a tape ball, will i be able to bowl it with a real cricket ball or will it be harder?
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Good to hear that but just don't go and get carried away otherwise you'll fall foul of the dreaded googly syndrome (see - Wrist Spin Bowling ). Is your Leg Break still okay?

I reckon you'll find it fairly easy and it'll spin off the seam well.

I've had a good day today. My leg break is coming together check out the news at - my main blogs at www.mpafirsteleven.blogspot.com & www.thegooglysyndrome.blogspot.com
 
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