Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Line and length

On the forums there's a lot of discussion centred around bowling Leg Breaks on a good line and length. As a learner the Wrist Spinner is notoriously innacurate leading to situations where they as individuals may lose a game for the whole team or in a better scenario they're taken off. Everyone knows that if you bowl short you're going to be hit for 4's and 6's to the four corners of the ground with ease by a batsman with a modicum of skill and as a result many Wrist Spinners throw in the towel and turn to one of the other easier bowling disciplines.

Currently I'm asking the question - is there any merit in leaving your efforts to spin the ball on the back boiler and focus on bowling straight just to ascertain whether you can bowl the ball on a decent line and length? The theory being that if you can establish this, you then at least know that you've got a grasp of the fundamentals. If you can master the basic actions of bowling it then strikes me that you would only need then to change your grip to the basic wrist spinners grip and start to add on the step over, the arm coming through past your hip, the rotation of the shoulders and the follow through and the ball is going to start to turn away from the edge of the bat?

A year ago this was virtually what I had to do in order to recover my Leg Break when it was lost to the Googly Syndrome. I went through a couple of months of bowling the Top Spinner with the wrist flick looking to turn the wrist slightly to get the leg break it didn't happen. It was only when I stopped trying to flick the wrist and concentrated on the basic wrist position and emphasised this in conjunction with making sure the ball left the 3rd finger with good contact that the ball started to move off the seam towards off.