Cricket: How to play spin

Sanjay Manjrekar in Cricinfo


Going into this grand home season for Indian Test cricket, many felt that India would find New Zealand the toughest team to beat. As it turned out, the New Zealand spinners were not all that potent and their batsmen did not quite measure up either. In the end it was a clean sweep for India, and with big margins too.

To be fair, you could say New Zealand did the best with what they had. Not once during the course of the three Tests did you get the impression that they were giving anything but 100%.

Their tactics were admirable. Throughout the series, you saw a definite, sensible plan in motion, one based on a sound study of Indian conditions and players. The problem was New Zealand's quality of execution, and it eventually came down to ability. In these conditions, the Indians were just more able, more skilled than New Zealand, and that decides the fate of a contest.

More than their bowling I was disappointed with the New Zealand batting, especially against spin. And this can be said of a few other teams too: the world is not playing spin too well these days.

The first and most basic thought when facing up to spin, especially on a turning pitch, is to try and judge the length of the ball. This has to be the only thought occupying your mind, nothing else.

Is this ball full or short? Depending on the length, you play forward or back. Watching batsmen play spin these days, I don't think enough importance is given to this thought. Maybe other ideas cloud their minds.

There is a chance you will survive on a seaming pitch without moving your feet too much, but on a turning pitch against good spinners, if you are not moving your feet, you have no chance.

The thing is, you can't attack your way out of trouble against spin. We saw this approach predictably fail when Ross Taylor tried it in the final innings of the series.

Reading what is coming out of the hand is not as necessary as it is to judge the length, and depending on it, playing off the front foot or back. Kane Williamson was the best at this for New Zealand.

The idea after that is to get the bat right to the pitch of the ball: even if you can't stretch forward too much to get your foot to the pitch of the ball, you need to get the bat right to where the ball has landed. Mohammad Azharuddin used to do this. He never stretched his front foot too far forward but ensured that the bat was still very close to the pitch of the ball. If you do this, you don't have to worry which way the ball is going to spin.

When you are unable to get the bat to where the ball has pitched, you need to go right back deep inside the batting crease, a la Virat Kohli, and then watch the ball off the pitch - which you should have time to do, since you have gone right back.

Despite your best intentions, there will be many occasions when you err in your judgement of the length and are caught half-forward, not quite to the pitch of the ball. This is when alarm bells must ring in your head, and you must become extremely wary of the ball, like you would with a deadly poisonous snake, for you have given it a chance to strike at you.

You now have to make a small, critical adjustment with just the bat; it's too late to do anything with your feet now. You have to be ready to quickly draw the bat away and not play the ball, open or close the face of the bat or simply change the original position of the bat depending on the behavior of the ball. It's like how a keeper changes his glove position when he is up to the stumps, as opposed to standing back, and there is a deflection off the bat.

When not to the pitch, I found there were far too many New Zealand batsmen offering rigid bats that did not change their original position if there was a change in ball behaviour. They were hoping that the ball would hit the centre of their bats. This is a recipe for disaster.

These limitations of the New Zealand batsmen should take no credit away from R Ashwin, nor should his performance be given less credit because it has come at home.

To start with, this series didn't have rank turners where all a spinner had to do was turn up. The jury is out on how Ashwin will fare overseas, but his returns in favourable conditions are mind-boggling, and his performance in this series has been truly praiseworthy. If a batsman gets 20 hundreds in 39 matches we call it Bradmanesque; what do we call this?

I stumbled on a remarkable difference between Ashwin and Harbhajan Singh with regards to their modes of dismissals.

When Harbhajan was at the 200-wickets mark in his career, he had a total of 47 lbws and bowleds. Ashwin at the same stage had 90, almost twice as many as Harbhajan.

This is no comment on who is better. Harbhajan will have had more bat-pad dismissals than Ashwin. But this is an important reason why Ashwin has a greater strike rate: along with bat-pad dismissals, he gives himself the opportunity to get lbws and bowleds too. He is willing to experiment and find new ways of getting wickets, while Harbhajan was quite one-dimensional and rarely had a plan B.

Finally, it was a delight to see Virat Kohli maturing quickly as a captain, in keeping with his rapid growth as a batsman in international cricket.

This observation does not come because he has just won a Test series; it is more to do with how he has been visibly more patient, when earlier his almost child-like exuberance seemed to get the better of him. The tendency to make frequent field and bowling changes seems to have gone now. Kohli's on-field tactics this series had the perfect blend of attack and defence; not once did it seem like he was over-attacking or ultra-defensive.

His cheerleading to get the crowd to make some noise and back his team up when things were quiet was a nice touch. Why, some fans might come to the ground just to be cheer-led by him.

Kohli was in the game every minute of the series.

Above all, for someone who is very much a modern-day product, in the way he looks and plays the other formats of the game, he showed he cares deeply for the five-day game. And that is a boon in these times for Test cricket.

Where Do High Class Spinners Pitch the Ball?

In another guest article, club left arm spinner AB talks us through exactly where to land the ball to cause maximum damage to batsmen’s averages. Courtesy Pitchvision Academy

We all know the key to top quality spin bowling is to bowl a consistent line and length. But what does that actually mean?

First we need to figure out where is the best length to bowl.

We want a length that is full enough that the batsman is forced to come forward, but not so full that he is able to reach the ball on the half volley without mis-hitting it.

Consider that the average spin bowler delivers the ball at approximately 50mph, and that after bouncing the speed of the ball is reduced by about 50%. This translates to a speed of about 10 metres a second. The average reaction time of a human is 0.2s. If we pitch the ball within 2 metres of the batsman, then he will be unable to play back as he would simply not have time to react to any movement off the pitch.

Therefore the maximum distance away from the batsman's stumps that we should land the ball, given that he will move back one foot when playing back, is approximately 11 foot. Anything shorter than 11 foot and the batsman will be able to play comfortably off the back foot.

 How about minimum distance?

A batsman playing on the front foot normally plays the ball about 3 feet in front of his crease. The ideal location to pitch the ball is the one at which the ball has just turned enough to hit or just miss the edge of the bat. On a normal pitch, we will find the ball turning something in the order of 5 degrees, which translates to about 1 inch sideways for each foot after bouncing.

Therefore we need to pitch the ball between 2 and 4 foot in front of the bat (8 to 10 foot from the stumps) in order to take the edge.

On a turning track, a ball pitching only a foot in front of the bat would be sufficient to threaten the edge.

The best length on this pitch would therefore be between 7 and 9 foot from the batsman's stumps. So the spin bowler has an area of about 4 feet, or just over a metre, in which to aim: anything inside this will pose the batsman problems.

------Also read

What India's spinners are doing wrong

Good Length and Right Speed

Spin and the art of attack

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Spinner’s line

No matter the pitch, the ball will not always turn a consistent amount. This variability of turn is major positive factor for the spinner. If he can't predict what will happen, how can the batsman be expected to?

A competent batsman will most likely play the percentages and play for a small amount of turn when defending off the front foot, reducing the likelihood of a ball that turns just 1 or 2 inches catching the edge. However, the inadvertent result of this is that now both the big turning delivery and the straight ball are the potential wicket taking deliveries. The spinner must always take advantage of this by ensuring that every time the ball beats the bat, whether the inside edge or outside edge, then there is a decent probability that the batsman will be dismissed.

Batsmen are able to play more assertively when they feel comfortable that they are able to use their pad as a second line of defence without the risk of being dismissed lbw. This is why it’s important for a spin bowler to constantly attack the stumps with either the big spinning delivery, the straight ball, or both.

We therefore want to keep as many deliveries as possible ending up in the danger zone: either on the stumps for a chance of bowled or lbw or within 6 inches of off stump for a likely caught behind chance.

On a spinning pitch, then 10 degrees of turn will translate to a difference of about 15 inches between the straight ball and the big turning delivery. So we need to take this into consideration when planning our line of attack.

 If the ball is turning away from the batsman, the ideal stock line is to pitch the ball on middle and leg, with the straight delivery angled in towards leg stump. Spin the ball hard enough for the spinning delivery to hit or go past the top of off stump.

The batsman will then be forced to play down a middle stump line to defend against the spin, and this will mean that both the straight delivery and the big spinner will have a good chance of dismissing him.

The off spinner should ensure that his big spinning delivery is not wasted by constantly turning down the leg side. This means that he needs to pitch the ball just outside off stump. A sensible batsman will then play down the line of off stump to defend against the spin, leaving both the big spinner and the straight ball as wicket-taking options.

Murali Kartik: How to bowl spin in England

Murali Kartik in Cricinfo

It was my first match for Middlesex and the team's first of the 2007 Championship. We were playing in Taunton against Justin Langer's Somerset. Ed Smith and Richard Pybus, the Middlesex captain and coach, had told me that I would be only filling in for our four seamers with the odd few overs before lunch, tea, and towards the end of the day.

Middlesex had scored 600 for 4 in their first innings. Left-arm spinner Ian Blackwell had taken one wicket. When it was our turn to bowl, Marcus Trescothick smashed our fast bowlers and Somerset racked up 100 for 1 in about ten overs.

Off my first ball I had Trescothick caught bat-pad at short leg. The guy who was told he would bowl only ten overs in the day ended up bowling 50 and finishing with 4 for 168. The seamers picked up six wickets in the drawn match in which more than 1600 runs had been scored.

You need to be big-hearted to bowl in England. It always boils down to your skill and your heart. That is the lesson I learned in my nine years of county cricket, where I played for four different teams.

India will know that since England don't have a specialist spinner anymore - after Graeme Swann's retirement and the disciplinary issues Monty Panesar is struggling with - it's highly unlikely that they will prepare pitches that will spin big even on the fourth day.

So apart from your batsmen putting up enough runs on the board to let you go out and bowl with confidence, the key to succeeding and remaining consistent as a spinner is to not be attacking all the time. I read that R Ashwin said he would like to be a more attacking spinner. That's easier said than done, especially in England, and given the way Alastair Cook and his men played spin in India in the 2012-13 Test series.

	One of my ploys was to push a fielder deep into areas where I expected the batsman to hit. I was telling the batsman: I'm attacking you, so try and take me on

In first-class cricket in England you need to understand your role on the first few days. If the pitch is not doing much, you become the stock bowler, play with your flight, set in-out fields, depending on the batsman, and give control to the captain and the team.

The conditions also dictate how you bowl. In England it's important to pitch on the right length; for a spinner that is good length. It is a good defensive and attacking length to stick to, particularly on pitches that can be slow. In overseas series, I have seen Ashwin being cut and pulled a lot. You can't lose your lengths in England; you can, at times, play with your lines.

Another important element to bowling well in England is to put a lot of body behind the ball. As Sanjay Manjrekar has repeatedly pointed out, many Indian spinners use their shoulders and fingers to impart turn, which is why they don't get enough out of unresponsive pitches, unlike Australia's Nathan Lyon, who can generate bounce even on pitches that do not take turn because he uses his body a lot more.

During India's first tour match of the 2011 tour to England, against Somerset, Amit Mishra went for some runs despite having bowled well on the second day. When he asked me how I bowled on such pitches, I told him that he had to realise that spinners will be hit. So you need to play around with the batsman's mind and the field placements.

One of my ploys was to push a fielder deep into areas where I expected the batsman to hit. I would place a deep midwicket to Trescothick, who played the lap shot really well and frequently. People might say it is a defensive mindset but they should understand that I am trying to block the batsman's big shot.

You should not be reacting after a shot has been hit. Instead I was telling the batsman: I'm attacking you. I have close-in fielders but I am also placing a fielder here for the big shot, so try and take me on. Sometimes it plays with his ego but it also brings me comfort and gives me freedom to experiment.

In England it is also a question of mind over matter. It is about sticking to your strengths and doing your job. You know the weather can be cold. You know that sometimes the pitches are going to be really slow and might not take spin. When nothing is going well for you, and this happens to every bowler, you must stay positive and bowl well.

It is not always about thinking of wickets. It is about biding your time. You have to adopt a role: if it is cold, keep lots of hand warmers with you; if the pitch is not taking spin, tell yourself you are going to stick to your lengths; play around with the fields; play with the batsman's mind; stick to your strengths.

Indian seamers won't find it hard to get used to the Dukes ball in England since it's similar to the SG ball they bowl with at home © Getty Images

John Emburey, the former Middlesex and England offspinner, told me that it was always good to try things. He said that at Lord's, spinners, especially left-arm ones, usually bowl from the Nursery End to take advantage of the slope. Emburey, who was accustomed to bowling from the Pavilion End, would switch sides with former England left-arm spinner Phil Edmonds to bowl from the Nursery End and bowl tighter lines on the off stump to force the outside edge. So it is important to be aware and open to doing things that you will not generally do.

One advantage the Indian spinners have is, they will not find it hard to get used to the Dukes ball, because it is similar to the one they use at home, the SG Test ball, which has a pronounced seam. The Dukes ball stays hard throughout, which is a good thing for a spinner, especially on a dry surface.

At times, more than the pitches, it is the success of the seamers up front that plays a vital role in the spinner being effective. Some of the surfaces in England can be really slow, especially at Lord's and The Oval. There is nothing for spinners at Trent Bridge. The Old Trafford pitch can break up, but at the Rose Bowl it won't.

Overall, the pitches are not going to be conducive to spin, especially in the wake of England's series defeat against Sri Lanka.

On Spin Bowling in India - 'You have no idea what you're doing here'

Like other Australian spinners in India, Gavin Robertson finished his tour with a good idea of how to bowl there. Somehow the lessons keep getting lost

Daniel Brettig

March 1, 2013

	Rahul Dravid was one of Gavin Robertson's three wickets in the second innings of the Bangalore Test that Australia won on the 1998 tour © Getty Images  Enlarge

 

Sitting towards the back of a Bangalore function room in March 1998, Gavin Robertson and Steve Waugh shared a glum, quiet dinner. Australia had been overtaken by India in the first Test, in Chennai, and then obliterated in the second, at the Eden Gardens. Robertson's offspin had been toyed with, while Waugh was coming to terms with his first Test-series loss in four years. Noticing the duo away from the gathered dignitaries, the august figure of Erapalli Prasanna ventured over to join the New South Welshmen. By way of a greeting he offered the words: "You have no idea what you're doing here."

Robertson's mere presence in India had been a shock to many. Touring Pakistan in 1994, then opposing Waugh for Australia A in the World Series Cup of the following home summer, Robertson had drifted so far from international reckoning that in the summer preceding the India Tests, he had played only a solitary Sheffield Shield game for the Blues. In it, however, he had taken seven wickets at Adelaide Oval, keeping his name from sliding completely. Shane Warne's desire to be paired with a spinner in the vein of the retired Tim May, and some prodding from Waugh and Mark Taylor subsequently, had Robertson trading his day job managing grocery shelves for a six-week journey through India.

"I was only training two or three days a week, which I almost find hilarious," Robertson recalls. "I wasn't that physically fit, I would eat whatever I had to at work to do long days, and play grade cricket on Saturday. The next thing I knew, I was playing Test cricket in 84% humidity and 44C. I think I lost 8kg on the trip."

Perhaps not surprisingly, given his preparation, Robertson struggled to find the right method, though he fought admirably in Chennai, taking wickets and making stubborn lower-order runs. Despite the team's pre-eminence as the world's top-rated side, there was a lack of knowledge and understanding about India, a country most had visited once or twice at most - this was Warne's baked beans tour, after all.

"It was a rollercoaster three Tests. We didn't really know what we were doing in the first Test, and my pace was wrong, even though I took five wickets. What happened to me the Indians did to both myself and Shane Warne. Every time you'd bowl a good ball they negated it and waited for that patience to go, and then they really went after you. If you had a moment where you bowled two or three bad balls in an over, then you all of a sudden went for 12 or 16 runs. That's where the pressure builds."

So when Prasanna made his challenge about Australia's ignorance of India, Robertson found himself nodding. Waugh was a little more feisty, remonstrating with the man often considered the best of all India's offspinners, and author of the immortal slow-bowling maxim "Line is optional, length is mandatory." Perhaps throwing in a four-letter word or two for emphasis, Waugh asked Prasanna, "Well, if you know so much, how about you tell us?" What followed would change Robertson's tour.

"Prasanna talked about how you've got to understand a batsman," Robertson says. "You want to try to lock the batsman on the crease with the amount of spin you've got on the ball and your pace and dip. You've got to combine that to make sure the batsman feels like if he leaves his crease to take a risk, it's going to drop on him and he'll lose the ball.

"So he'll search quickly to defend, and that will cause him to feel nervous about leaving his crease, and that'll start to get him locked on his crease. Then you'll get him jutting out at the ball and jabbing at it with his hands. Then he'll start trying to use his pad and his bat together to negate a good ball. Finally he said, 'All you have to do is get that right pace and create that feeling, and then you have to do it for 20 or 30 overs in a row, and you'll bowl them out.'"

	"It's about finding the right pace and line that locks the batsman on the crease. If you can do it for long periods of time, you win the pressure battle, you break them down, you get wickets"Gavin Robertson

Subtlety, discipline and consistency. These were not outlandish tactics, but they mirrored what Robertson had seen from his Indian counterparts, both in 1998 and on the tours to follow. Over the next few days before the third Test, in Bangalore, Robertson worked at this method, quickening his pace slightly and seeing useful results in the nets. By the time he came on to bowl again on the first morning of the match, his confidence was restored to a decent level. Flicking the ball from hand to hand, he thought of bowling a couple of tidy maidens before lunch then settling in for the afternoon.

Nathan Lyon is familiar with the sort of thing that happened next. Those two overs went for plenty, leaving Robertson's mind to race again. "I went to lunch with 0 for 31 off two and I thought, 'I'm in real trouble here,'" he says. "When I came back on after lunch Stephen [Steve Waugh] was at mid-off and I said 'I'm going to go for it here, I'm going to try to spin a bit harder and bowl a bit quicker.'

"I added two extra steps to my run-up, which I'd never done. I told myself to bowl like a medium-pace offspinner - you bowl with a quicker arm action and actually get more on the ball. I bowled to Tendulkar and he came forward, it gripped and it spun, went past him, nearly hit Ian Healy in the head and went for four byes.

"I just kept doing it. I went from 0 for 31 off two overs to 2 for 58 off 11.2 overs, and in the second innings I took 3 for 28 off 12 and we won the Test. Those were the lessons. It sounds quite simple, but it's having the experience and the patience to keep doing it. They're not worried about you unless you bowl really well."

Robertson's awakening to what was required to bowl spin effectively in India is a tale that is true for many Australian spin bowlers who have ventured to the subcontinent. Robertson describes it as cases of "failure, failure, then some success by the time you go home". Jason Krejza was all but a lost cause on the 2008 trip until he worked with Bishan Bedi in the Delhi nets, and subsequently harvested 12 wickets - albeit expensive ones - in Nagpur. Nathan Hauritz was never able to settle in 2010 as he entered the tour after injury and then had his bowling style changed, not by the locals but by Ricky Ponting, who desired his tweaker to "bowl more like Harbhajan Singh", whatever that meant. None were granted a second chance to tour India and use the knowledge gained on the earlier visit.

"You could almost have all those learnings on a whiteboard or some sort of document that relays 'This is the plan for this, we know what we've been up against before, knock it over,'" Robertson says. "That's what I thought we were supposed to be doing when we went two and half weeks early. We probably haven't learned from those past tours."

For now, Lyon is trying to work out how best to succeed in Hyderabad, having taken four wickets in Chennai but at an enormous cost. Robertson recalled Prasanna's advice, but also the example set by R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja in Chennai.

"Have a look at the pace the Indian bowlers bowled at in the first Test," he says. "Just over, say, an hour or 15-over period, and watch how many times they're full and they're up outside off stump and spinning back. And then watch us and see how many times in that period we get short and get worked. How many times do we get scored off short balls, and how many times the other way?

"The Indians always bowl full with the right pace, the ball is dropping at sufficient pace and there's not enough time to get down the wicket to it. In Australia, Nathan Lyon can bowl on middle stump and a little bit short. Because the wickets are so quick here, it's so much harder for a batsman to punish it. Over there it's so slow, as soon as you bowl too short and on the wrong line, it just sits up like a cherry and it goes.

"It's about finding the right pace and line that locks the batsman on the crease. If you can do it for long periods of time, you win the pressure battle, you break them down, you get wickets."

Prasanna could not have said it better himself.

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Good Length and Right Speed

Will Rhodes on Good Length for a bowler

A good length is the shortest length where a batsman is obliged to play forward.

The Right Speed is when a batsman beaten by flight does not have the time to play a second shot.

England fail intelligence test

Angus Fraser:


Fast bowlers have the somewhat unfair reputation of being big, thick, dopey so and sos, incapable of thinking for themselves.


The stigma is historical, arising from the fact that previous generations of batsmen tended to be privately educated chaps that had picked up a degree at some flash university. The roots of a fast bowler tend to be far more working-class, as England's northern-based bowling attack highlights.

Australia's fast bowlers made a mockery of the generalisation yesterday morning as they intelligently adapted their game to capitalise on helpful bowling conditions to dismantle England's batting line-up for a paltry 102. With the stock of fast bowlers at a high England's bowlers then let the fraternity down with a thoughtless display during the afternoon. Only when Australia had passed England's total did Andrew Strauss's attack begin to follow the example set by their opponents.

The modern game is obsessed by pace, with many selectors and pundits believing that 85mph is the minimum speed a bowler needs to reach to be effective on the International stage. It is absolute tosh, as many of cricket's greatest bowlers have and continue to prove.

Yes, pace is important, but the one proviso is that the ball is pitched on the correct spot – a length that makes life for a batsman uncomfortable and difficult for him to complete the task he is paid to do – score runs. If the ball is released at speed but comes out like the spray from an aerosol can, it only disappears to the boundary quicker. Much of the blame for the obsession can be laid at the feet of the speed gun at grounds and the egos of He-man bowlers.

James Anderson, Stephen Harmison, Graeme Onions and Stuart Broad could not blame their shortcomings on the fact they needed time to acclimatise – Australia's bowlers had already shown them how to bowl at Headingley earlier in the day. With the ball swinging Australia's bowlers largely pitched the ball up, drawing England's top order in to apprehensive prods and pushes that fed the hands of an expectant slip cordon. On watching this England's bowlers then opted to test the middle of the pitch, a transgression that kept the crowd rather than the slips busy.

The early dismissal of Simon Katich, who gloved a lifter from Stephen Harmison to leg gully, may have encouraged England's attack to bang the ball in. But with Australia's score rattling along at six runs an over it should not have taken long to work out this was not the correct tactic. The three lbws that followed highlighted the error.

Peter Siddle will grab the headlines for his second five-wicket haul in Test cricket, but it was Stuart Clark who set the tone for Australia with three pre-lunch wickets in a beautiful seven-over spell of bowling that conceded only seven runs. Clark is a bowler from the old school, a seamer who takes great pride in bowling a consistent line and length.

Clark is not fast, bowling generally between 78 and 82mph, and like many traditional seamers he struggles to comprehend the trends and attitudes of modern bowlers. Half-volleys and long hops are not part of his game plan, not at any cost. In Clark's world batsmen have to work for their runs.

In Glenn McGrath, Clark had a great tutor, possibly the best line and length bowler the game has seen. Like Clark, McGrath cannot understand why so many young bowlers continually press the gamble button as they desperately search for wickets. In many ways their attitude mirrors that of the world outside. Instant gratification rather than patient reward is what they want.

"Work on the ego of the batsman," was one of McGrath's mottos. Basically he was saying that batsmen want to be in control and score freely when they bat, and when they are not they are likely to make mistakes attempting to gain it.

It therefore makes sense for bowlers to follow the logic of McGrath and the example set by Clark, especially at a venue like Headingley. Batsmen will make mistakes so be patient, wait for the errors to come along and grasp the chance when it arises. Bowlers may have the reputation of being a bit thick but it is batsmen who are really the dopey, impatient so and sos.

Spicy pitch makes life more fun

England may have been second best yesterday but the play highlighted how much more enjoyable Test cricket is when wickets are falling regularly.

A pitch used to be described as good if it was nice to bat on. If Test cricket is to remain attractive that must change, and groundsmen need to be encouraged to produce pitches that offer bowlers assistance.

Test cricket should not be played on minefields that offer inconsistent bounce and generous lateral movement, but scores of 450-plus should be a rarity not the norm.