Friday, July 30, 2010

Bit of practice in the paddock

I've been commenting on the forums about Richie Benuads claim that you'll need to be bowling Leg - Breaks for 4 years before you'll get any real control over them and I'm going with that because I'm still struggling with the Biggun - the one with the big pronounced flick that has the ball leaving the hand with seam at 90 degrees to the direction of flat and tilted forwards slightly to get some drift. As always I have short periods where it happens and I can do it over shorter distances - 18 yards, but can't produce it over 22 yards on a consistent basis. I can always fall back on my normal leg break, but I need to be able to bowl the Biggun in order to install an increased fear factor.

I have seen recently a different style of Leg Breaks from the captian of B&PCC 'Pinno the Spinno' who's bowling looks very unorthodox with a weak follow through, no real 'Explosion' through the action and very slow loopy flight. He gets the ball to turn off the wicket, so I'm assuming he is ripping the ball out of the hand - but he also makes a fair few mistakes - drag downs and pitching the ball off of the cut area sometimes through the amount of effort that he puts into turning the ball. But then when he gets it right he seems to really worry batsmen and it looks as though it's the loopy flight that causes the problems. I noted at Lords when Ben, Joe and I went a couple of weeks back - Marcus Norths bowling was flighty.

As a result of these observations, I may look at this approach and possibly adopt it as part of my bowling variation? Yesterday I bowled in excess of 200 balls on the paddock flighting the ball and getting it to land in a large deep bucket, the flight with a steeply dropping ball is required otherwise the ball hits the side. Overall the drill looks good as a way of working on accuracy and I keep an eye on the balls that land around the bucket to see how well they turn off the wicket and they're still turning okay. I'll try and photograph it or look at video-ing it just to show what I'm doing.