Wrist Spin Bowling

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Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

We do a lot of work with bowling at targets and no batsman. We chalk out rectangles of corridors where good length bowling should land. We vary them for bowling at left handers.

There is no need for the targets to be small, especially to begin with, because there is actually a large area to land the ball effectively whilst still working on accuracy. We are not trying to land on a handkerchief or Benauds coin-sized paint spot but rather a large shape ,say two foot by six foot mainly outside offstump

Another target we use is a vinyl circle about 1 foot in diameter and I will place this on the pitch and vary it after every ball, it is not expected to hit this target often, especially at first. It is important to watch or have someone watch for you exactly where it is landing each ball. You have to consider each delivery and discuss its line and length before anything else such as spin.

Grimmett gives a target of 3 feet x 3 feet, on the stumps and about three yards in front of the popping crease. He used paint and brush.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

someblokecalleddave;346928 said:
Saddo, I nearly had the Wings to Fly video on Thursday night. My captain said "Oh **** Dave I've got your video at home - I stuck it on the side so I wouldn't forget it and I've just walked straight past it and left it there". So it's here, it's just a case of getting my hands on it.

I think your captain needs a bit of pestering. I am getting morbidly curious about this video.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

macca;346861 said:
We do a lot of work with bowling at targets and no batsman. We chalk out rectangles of corridors where good length bowling should land. We vary them for bowling at left handers.

There is no need for the targets to be small, especially to begin with, because there is actually a large area to land the ball effectively whilst still working on accuracy. We are not trying to land on a handkerchief or Benauds coin-sized paint spot but rather a large shape ,say two foot by six foot mainly outside offstump

Another target we use is a vinyl circle about 1 foot in diameter and I will place this on the pitch and vary it after every ball, it is not expected to hit this target often, especially at first. It is important to watch or have someone watch for you exactly where it is landing each ball. You have to consider each delivery and discuss its line and length before anything else such as spin.

Grimmett gives a target of 3 feet x 3 feet, on the stumps and about three yards in front of the popping crease. He used paint and brush.

As a Chinaman where would you recommend pitching? about 3 paces forward of the batting crease and a little outside off?
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

La Gecko;346863 said:
As a Chinaman where would you recommend pitching? about 3 paces forward of the batting crease and a little outside off?
As a rough measurement that sounds pretty good. That might be a well pitched ball in a lot of circumstances but it varies a fair bit of course.

If you could consistently land it around that spot you would have gained good control.

Philpott reckons young legspinners especially should begin their bowling spell with a line well wide of offstump and move it over towards middle and off as they settle in and warm up. I dont know about left arm unorthodox though. You need to have your field set right.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

macca;346857 said:
Dave it is only early in the season so I wouldn't worry too much about non-selction, but what if it turns out they dont appreciate leg spin in your team but someone else will give you a game every week, would you change clubs?

In the age group your boys will be playing, what sort of pitches do they play on? What size, 18 yards? There never seems to be a lot of justice at that age in that good bowling isn't always rewarded, and poor catching and keeping can rob the young bowler of many wickets.

I remember reading in an article by Stuart Mc Gill where he said to expect a young legspinner, if he is spinning the ball ,to get lots of wickets in the early years but the wickets will tend to dry up as he gets into his teen years.

In relation to flighting the ball, another instance where you might not want to is on a wicket where not even the legspinner can get any turn, on that giving the ball too much loop could be a disaster. The big leg-break with some backspin will spin on just about anything, but a well rolled, or glassy, evenly grassed, hard deck even blunted Warnes spin sometimes.



Yeah probably I don't want to spend all these hours of practice and for it not to come to anything, a couple of blokes I bowled against on Wednesday night and cleaned em up reckoned that the team my kids play for would have me. They also said that if I turned up at the local pitch this Sunday another team that plays at the ground are often scratching around for players and they said they'd probably give me a game if I don't get a game this Sunday. I've sent my captain 2 text's today and I still haven't got an answer.

They're proper grass wickets and they'd mark it out for 17 yards I reckon. With regards Joe's bowling yeah a lot of his wickets go amiss because 50% of them should go to catches and they're invariably dropped, but he's okay with that, he doesn't get to stressed by the dropped chances but it is gutting to watch the dollies go down.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

yeah im back
well its the off season so i dont get much chance to train
but i have been practising you advice and it seems to be workin with the ball spining alot more
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

With regards the length a bloke once showed me the length should be dictated by standing with your back foot on the crease and then reaching out with a bat making an arc. He said to bowl right onto the line that the arc would create. In matches we're encouraged to pitch it further, but again it depends on what you're bowling, best thing is to vary the length but keep a good line and that comes down to practice and more practice and then some more.

Update; I've not been selected again, so that's another cricketless weekend. I wonder if there's such a thing as a register for mercenary cricketers or cricket freelancers as such.

Have bat will travel kind of thing?
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

That link has been out of action for a while - now it's back in action I'll put my name in for the next few games. Looking at the other link it looks as though they're playing one of the new blokes in place of me and he's an off-spinner (Jay) and it looks as though he's doing okay.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

someblokecalleddave;346914 said:
best thing is to vary the length but keep a good line

Yes, that is why we make our targets relatively long and narrow corridors. We only bowl 4 or 5 overs per target session but we try and concentrate and evaluate each ball, line and length first, than spin, etc.

I watch from the keepers position exactly where each ball has landed in relation to the target and then we will discuss this point.

Then I might bat against him with the chalked targets still in place and discuss each ball after it is bowled. I might make up a scenario where I will bat say left-handed and anchored to my crease and he has to come up with a plan to bowl to me.

Grimmett thought organised team net sessions were a bit of a con run by batsmen, but he said to use the sessions as training to try and plan batsmens downfalls, and if one plan works and you get a wicket , try another plan. He was very reticent to bowl in nets at his team mates in the Australian side as he knew the more they faced him, the better they would play him when they met again in interstate games.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Yeah nets can be disheartening for that reason, the more you bowl against your team mates the more they're able to counter your bowling, especially if you're new and you're not sure of the different approaches you can take with your bowling to maximise your bowling potential. On the other hand if you can stay positive it then becomes far more tactical and it's like a game of chess albeit spoiled by the fact that you have to wait your turn so some of the intensity and pressure that you maybe trying to build gets lost in the queue.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

The off season is a good time to work on your bowling if you can find time. You can muck about with some new deliveries or spend a lot a time on your variations , like the wrongun, without the danger of it affecting your bowling with a match around the corner.

Grimmett warns of having too many deliveries on the go at once. He said he "pruned" his range in the actual season, whilst working on just about every type of ball out of season. For instance he says once he got his flipper perfected he hardly ever used his wrongun except to lefthanders. He said this was because he didn't like too many tools on hand at once for the job at any one time.

If he couldn't take a wicket he could always dig into his bag of tricks if need be, but like O'Rielly and Benaud he strongly advises against too much variety at once except in rare circumstances.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

someblokecalleddave;346921 said:
On the other hand if you can stay positive it then becomes far more tactical and it's like a game of chess
Grimmett was compared to a chess player or a billiards player in that his plans were long term and his traps often took some time to set.

When he was playing for S.A against Jardines Englishmen as Hammond came out to bat he nominated to his team mates the fourth ball of his fifth over as when he would dismiss the great batsman. He kept Hammond pinned down by firing in at his legs for five overs and on the fourth ball he flighted one up well outside off stump and had Hammond stumped. His captain at the time, Vic Richardson, said after that event everyone was convinced that Grimmett was indeed a genius.

Richardson was also the Australian captain at the time and after the 1930 tour of England said " we could have won the ashes without Bradman but we could not have beaten the blind school without Grimmett "
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Dave , what are the pitches like at the moment, they wouldn't be new every week would they? They probably dont suit legspin ? Maybe it has something to do with it ?
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

In noted that you were surprised that I also had a blog on here as well. Yeah I'm pretty prolific with the writing of all this stuff. Funnily enough the blokes that I had a knock with on Wednesday Wrist Spin Bowling: Now that was good! were talking about cricket on the web and wrist spin bowling and one of them mentioned the pitch vision academy run by David Hinchcliffe and was saying that he'd been reading a load of stuff off the internet about wrist spin bowling off his website. Chances are that may have been a link to my blog! This thread and my blog come up on the 1st 10 searches in Google most of the time if you use wrist spin in your search. I noted that this thread is one of the biggest threads on here as well, but I reckon at some point we'll have covered virtually everything and it'll slow down a bit. We need some fresh input I reckon. Or some strategy where we discuss certain things in a order like they do in magazines and the same subject comes up in a 12 month cycle!
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

macca;347242 said:
Dave , what are the pitches like at the moment, they wouldn't be new every week would they? They probably dont suit legspin ? Maybe it has something to do with it ?

All the pitches are brand new just having been cut and rolled for the first time. This in itself is a complex issue, I once saw Boycott drop a ball on a wicket in the West Indies during the world cup from shoulder height and the ball almost bounced back up to the same height! Suggesting the pitch was almost as hard as concrete. This also brings in the issues regarding the quality of the balls your using as well. There's obviously an enormous difference between the £65 a go Kookaburra and Dukes balls compared to the £10 balls that we get to use. The balls combined with the differing standards of wickets needless to say has a big impact on how much you can get the ball to turn. 95% of my practice occurs on football pitches that are grassy and on these pitches I can get the ball to bounce and spin really well in the direction that I want it to. The other 5% is with plastic hockey balls on smooth tarmac and concrete and again the ball bounces in a way that corresponds to the spin you're putting on it. So up till recently I've been of the opinion that these skills and techniques would readily transfer to a proper cricket wicket. But the reality is that they don't. If you were to do the Boycott ball drop on a wicket here I'm sure that it would barely bounce back up 6". So you have to assume that you're not going to get much out of the wickets I play on. The point made about Grimmett earlier and his limiting of his different balls is interesting and one that I might adopt in view of the non-responsive wickets. Maybe Top Spinners and Flippers if there's no turn being offered?

The wicket I played on at the weekend is particularly non-responsive and it's one that I've practiced on with permission from the Groundsman before on several occassions and it just doesn't offer any assistance with spin at all. I practice on the outfield quite frequently and at the end of the session I'll bowl 6 balls down the track to see if I can get the ball to turn and I never can. As yet this year as it's only been cut last weekend I've not been able to try it out, but when I get the chance I'll give it ago and see if I can get it to turn?

With regards the variations I reckon I'll stick with the Leg Break and see how that works out and also use the Top-Spinner and Flipper. I'm hoping the Leg Break will serve me well, if it does I might change my mind and limit it down to that and the Wrong Un. I'll have to see how it goes over the next few weeks.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Saddo, I nearly had the Wings to Fly video on Thursday night. My captain said "Oh **** Dave I've got your video at home - I stuck it on the side so I wouldn't forget it and I've just walked straight past it and left it there". So it's here, it's just a case of getting my hands on it.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

The wicket I played on at the weekend is particularly non-responsive and it's one that I've practiced on with permission from the Groundsman before on several occassions and it just doesn't offer any assistance with spin at all. I practice on the outfield quite frequently and at the end of the session I'll bowl 6 balls down the track to see if I can get the ball to turn and I never can. As yet this year as it's only been cut last weekend I've not been able to try it out, but when I get the chance I'll give it ago and see if I can get it to turn?


So you will have to try to beat them in flight, and subtle variations. Today saw parts of the IPL matches and Mishra(legspinner) and Murali Karthik (left arm orthodox spinner), did not turn it one inch despite the fact that they were bowling large sidespinners, but they were still the most economical of bowlers, Warne even took 2 wickets in 4 overs!

But as you say it is quite disconcerting bowling on concrete/tarmac surfaces and getting decent turn, then changing surface and getting none. Today I went to a nearby field and the ball as you say barely bounced 6 inches even with topspin. About 20 percent turned like leg breaks, but am not sure if it was due to irregularity of the surface. But on the bright side at least without trying I could bowl a straight one onto the stumps. Probably the wickets in the UK will be more conducive to spin later in the summer when they start cracking and crumbling, so helping grip. Pray for a dry summer so.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Fresh input is always welcome, it was good to hear from the lefty el Gecko.
I suppose we keep going over a lot of the same ground. The whole subject is on one hand complex and complicated but can be kept simple and should be especially around game time.

Coaches should keep a lot of the complexity in their own heads and try and convey how basic a lot of it is to their students by simplifying it as much as possible, especially in the preteen years.

I reckon Warne was the greatest example of keeping it simple we will ever see. But he still was a student of the game and the first thing he would ask a Bradman era player he met was " how did Clarrie grip the ball for his flipper and what tactics did he employ?" my estimation of Warne as a thinker on the game went way up after reading that.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

sadspinner;347201 said:
Originally Posted by macca
We had a bowl this morning, bowling into a breeze from fine leg he was getting drift into the wind with an indoor ball, I dont know how that works. The ball is old but the seam is still high.

We only bowled 4 overs but he finished up with this palm ball he got shown and it really has potential as a simple variation. It behaved different from everything else he bowled and hit the stumps. It seemed to come at a different angle of flight with a scrambled slow spinning seam, no turn, but from where I was behind the stumps it looked a lot like his legbreak until it pitched and came straight on at an angle from just outside off. He only bowled 2 the second one behaved exactly the same.

It sounds like Warne's slider that he bowls on the Nicholas video. It looks like a leg break but as it is not ripped it goes straight. The batsman plays for turn, but finds it is a straight one. Ouch out lbw. It could also behave like a small backspinner philpott says Holland the leg spinner used to bowl. I think he says it was sort of palmed out of the hand. To me though sounds more like a warne slider( as we discussed earlier, jenner's slider is completely different as it is a backspinner).

What do you think Macca which delivery do you figure it is? And any other tips they gave your son? Or does the aussie association have some sort of DVD like the ECB's about leg spin equivalent to the wings to fly. You do not find these even on you tube. Must be some state secret me thinks.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

i am a right arm leg spinner
one of my development coaches gave my some advice
he said that at the moment my palm or face of hand is facing the wrong way during end of delivery
he wants me to face it more straight down the wicket so i get more spin
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Yeah there are some dvd,s some of it is on youtube like the mc gill stuff. I am doing my level 1 coaching now so I will be getting them soon and I will share any thing I can.

The delivery is a slider but that is a slightly confusing term as it applies to a type of a delivery rather than one in particular these days. It was sold as a zooter and it is the easiest variation my son has tried. He has only bowled it twice, but it shows promise.

My sons problem is he has been a legspinner from day one and finds it impossible to bowl a seamer! but the ball held back in his palm makes it possible somehow.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

shuey_cricket;346940 said:
i am a right arm leg spinner
one of my development coaches gave my some advice
he said that at the moment my palm or face of hand is facing the wrong way during end of delivery
he wants me to face it more straight down the wicket so i get more spin
Listen to your coach , you are lucky to have one. When my 11 year old starts doing what it sounds like your doing I have to get him to bowl against a wall for a while and really exaggerate that palm facing the batsman for the leg break. I get him to freeze in that position with his right hand as he catches the ball off the wall with his left hand.

We had a bowl this morning, bowling into a breeze from fine leg he was getting drift into the wind with an indoor ball, I dont know how that works. The ball is old but the seam is still high.

We only bowled 4 overs but he finished up with this palm ball he got shown and it really has potential as a simple variation. It behaved different from everything else he bowled and hit the stumps. It seemed to come at a different angle of flight with a scrambled slow spinning seam, no turn, but from where I was behind the stumps it looked a lot like his legbreak until it pitched and came straight on at an angle from just outside off. He only bowled 2 the second one behaved exactly the same.
 
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Yes, I always suspected that warne's slider and the zooter were practically the same delivery. So warne didn't use a backspinner besides the flipper. I do not think i have seen any such delivery on you tube, on the other hand he got bell with a slder when bell was playing for leg spin.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

macca;346929 said:
I reckon Warne was the greatest example of keeping it simple we will ever see. But he still was a student of the game and the first thing he would ask a Bradman era player he met was " how did Clarrie grip the ball for his flipper and what tactics did he employ?" my estimation of Warne as a thinker on the game went way up after reading that.



In his video with mark Nicholas, warne states that the important thing is to make the batsman play the stroke you want him to. Not to land the ball on a particular spot. Besides being great in terms of spin, line and length, I still think he hot massive amounts of wickets by bullying and psychologically dominating batsmen and umpires. He had the personality to do it. Had MacGill had more of that personality I think he would have been more successful. I think he could spin the ball as much as or possibly even more than warne, but in view of his personality did not have that aura around him. The feeling is when batsmen came in they felt they were doomed... it was a question in their minds of how long they would survived, so their attitude would already be negative, they would have lost before they started.

On the topic of working the batsman out, in the book there is a chapter of how to bowl to batsmen that have different charecteristics, which is very good. I would use it, but first I have to get the legbreak working consistently on the right line and length. I should be there before my pension arrives!
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

I dont know anything about English wickets but ideally the best wickets for a legspinner are close to those of an ideal batting wicket. A bit of wear of course is best but a hard well evenly grassed bouncy pitch where you can gather nip off the deck combined with a headwind is what you need. A slow seaming one with no bounce would be the worst and the average legspinner would not expect a game.

I thought like saddo that Daves day may come later on if you get a summer like 1975 and things dry out and harden up.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

macca;346919 said:
Grimmett thought organised team net sessions were a bit of a con run by batsmen, but he said to use the sessions as training to try and plan batsmens downfalls, and if one plan works and you get a wicket , try another plan. He was very reticent to bowl in nets at his team mates in the Australian side as he knew the more they faced him, the better they would play him when they met again in interstate games.


The same with Iverson. His club captain used to avoid him bowling to the aussie national side players in the nets, as he was afraid they would work him out, especially as he was very naive in the cricketing sense, with little variations. A spinner cannot bully the batsman with pace, he cannot frighten him with physical injury, but certainly can play on his overconfidence and out fox him. That seems to have always been the way with spinners
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

macca;347273 said:
I dont know anything about English wickets but ideally the best wickets for a legspinner are close to those of an ideal batting wicket. A bit of wear of course is best but a hard well evenly grassed bouncy pitch where you can gather nip off the deck combined with a headwind is what you need. A slow seaming one with no bounce would be the worst and the average legspinner would not expect a game.

I thought like saddo that Daves day may come later on if you get a summer like 1975 and things dry out and harden up.

And maybe hope for a lot of rough outside the right handers leg stump to bowl them the massive leg break for another ball of the century, or at least get them round their legs. Dream on, but I am a saddo after all!
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Meh. My CPU went down. Sorry I didn't answer earlier. How did I sort it out? Good question. I'm not sure I'm doing anything differently. I know I just spun it hand-to-hand for two days, and then went and bowled at my tree. Nothing but the leg-break. Palm perpindicular to where I wanted the ball to go. When it landed where I knew the slant of the ground opposed the spin, it carried straight. Somewhere I think is relatively flat let it turn, and where I knew the ground helped the spin, it turned almost ninety degrees.

To prevent it from happening again, I'm considering fingerspinning an off-break instead of a wrong un' for my odd ball. Would that produce the same effect?
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

That sounds like a good place to be - bowling leg breaks with no effort whatsoever! I'm sure the straight ball will come, maybe over do it turn the wrist too far so that it starts to become a wrong un? Maybe that'll work as a straight ball?

Re our wickets - I'm of the impression that they get worse, they almost become powdery so you're almost bowling into a sandy consistency! That's what Grays was like last year, no-one could get the ball to bounce. I think your 1975 was in fact 1976 when we had at 30 degrees + for over a month? We've had better since there was a brilliant summer a few years back when we had our hottest day of 38 degrees and most sun but it was scattered across the summer rather than concentrated in one big continuous run of sunshine like 76.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

Cotton Eye Joe;347020 said:
To prevent it from happening again, I'm considering fingerspinning an off-break instead of a wrong un' for my odd ball. Would that produce the same effect?
It would produce the same effect more or less but is hard to disguise. I saw Warne bowl the odd off-break usually when he was throwing the kitchen sink at the batsmen during a long partnership that was proving impossible to break. Now that you are aware of the wrongun syndrome you can watch out for it coming back.

You can get by without a wrongun , especially early on when you only bowl short spells. You can carve out a career with just a legsinner and topspinner.
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

I think Warne had the flipper before the backspinner as shown in the jenner video. Bob Simpson showed him how to bowl it, and Simpson called it Philpotts backspinning topspinner. Philpott says Benaud bowled this delivery very often sometimes up to half his deliveries! and it was a better ball than Benauds flipper.

Grimmett describes the other sliders as simply applying some backspin with your fingers as you release the ball like a seamer but disguising it as a legbreak. Slider comes from baseball and describes how the ball seems to run down at the batsman like on a slippery dip I think.
 
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I don't know if it's a temporary abberation or something but as my leg break comes back I seem to be losing the plot with the Wrong Un! I got a game today with a bunch of blokes at the local pitch (SDR), they let me have two overs and I was rubbish. They did tell me what SDR stood for but it was pretty much a joke name they came up with when they started out and now they just call themselves SDR.

The other team I initially approached (The home team) said they'd give me a game next Sunday and the SDR blokes have invited me to their net sessions this Friday, so this has all worked out quite well in the short term.
 
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someblokecalleddave;347275 said:
Re our wickets - I'm of the impression that they get worse, they almost become powdery so you're almost bowling into a sandy consistency! That's what Grays was like last year, no-one could get the ball to bounce.
Tell them to get the heavy roller on to compact it, and get the areas of rough to bowl onto. But it is agreed if there is practically no bounce that is a problem, possibly bowl flippers and toppies to confuse them with the minimal bounce change. By the way, if the bounce is so low how do batsmen hit the ball. It must be with the toe ends as i think the sweet spot is usually higher up on the bat unless it is made for the subcontinent.
 
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They can't judge your bowling after two overs. Is this going to be a regular gig now?

What is the standard like , how does it compare to the other comp?
 
Re: Wrist Spin Bowling

macca;347276 said:
I think Warne had the flipper before the backspinner as shown in the jenner video. Bob Simpson showed him how to bowl it, and Simpson called it Philpotts backspinning topspinner. Philpott says Benaud bowled this delivery very often sometimes up to half his deliveries! and it was a better ball than Benauds flipper.


Did you ever see warne though bowl the backspinner, I do not recall seeing any on you tube, so probably was not a big wicket taking delivery. If you can find one can you post the link please. Jenners is the only one I have seen, it seems to be quite easy for him though maybe he had to have many takes before he got it right(becoming nasty)
 
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No I've paid my membership for my own team and as you've said as the season goes on I might get the call up? It was pretty much the same level I play with the Grays blokes 2nd/3rd XI. It suits me in the short term as it means I'm playing and it'll mean I'll get in the nets again for more practice. So hopefully I'll be able to make a better account of myself with these blokes in the nets and if I get to play with them again I might get more overs? I was surprised that they gave me the two overs in the first place but I was a bit nervous as it was in front of a bunch of blokes I didn't know and it was against the opening partnership who were up in the 100+ runs when I was brought on and very settled.
 
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I've just looked at Jenners vid again as you're talking about it and it looks do-able but at this juncture what with me saying I'm going to take Grimmetts advice and concentrate on three deliveries I'll steer well clear of it. I reckon if there's any Aussies out there that are looking in but not contributing and there obviously is because we get so many views on this thread - it's you lot that should be giving this a go as you're in your closed season and letting us know how you're getting on and upload your vids on youtube?
 
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