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Showing posts with label off. Show all posts
Showing posts with label off. Show all posts

Monday 27 February 2017

How I learnt to (nearly) bowl the doosra

Ashley Mallett in Cricinfo

The final day of the South Australia versus West Indies match was supposed to be a red-letter day for the local spin twins, offie Ashley Mallett and leggie Terry Jenner. Opener Ashley "Splinter" Woodcock was standing in for our captain, Ian Chappell, and Splinter told all and sundry in the media overnight that the spinners would take his team to victory.

It was December 23, 1975. West Indies had scored just 188 and we had declared with eight down for 419. Not all went to plan in Splinter's spin strategy, though, for neither TJ nor I got a bowl before lunch and had to wait an hour to get on in the middle session.

I got left-hander Roy Fredericks caught at first slip by Gary Cosier, who rarely hung on to one in that position. Then I found myself trying to breach the seemingly impenetrable defence of the two incumbents enjoying a good fourth-wicket stand: Viv Richards and Lawrence Rowe. I vividly recall bowling two ordinary offies to Rowe, which he dismissed with all the energy and obvious joy of a headmaster whacking you with a full swipe of his cane.

It was then I hit on the idea of doing what I used to do as a youngster when my offbreaks were off the radar; I decided to bowl a legbreak.

The ball left in a song of spin, a fluttering-buzzing sound to gladden the ear. As it made its way towards the relaxed Rowe, it curved slightly to the leg side. I figured he would pick the change from my hand, but that didn't matter. He still had to play it. As it turned out, the ball landed in a bit of rough outside leg stump, Rowe attempted to sweep, missed the ball entirely, and it crept round the back of his legs, hitting middle and off stumps with just enough force to dislodge a bail.

TJ was at first slip and I waltzed down the pitch, spinning leggies from hand to hand, and said: "Mate, this legspin caper is a breeze. I think I'll stop right now."

And indeed, I never bowled another leggie in international cricket. Maybe I should have done.

----Also read


Leg spin Q & A from Warne's coach

On Walking - Advice for a Fifteen Year Old

Drift - Spin Bowling

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I had always hoped to create a genuine hard-spun legbreak with an offbreak action. I could achieve it okay, but not by bowling it. It had to be thrown.

In Perth grade cricket I bowled offies and would keep bowling that way until inevitably the day would come when offbreaks didn't bring enough wickets. So the next week I'd bowl legbreaks

I remember a Perth grade match when our main spinner, a slow-medium offie, Ron Frankish, was operating to a right-hander, Fremantle's Brian Muggleton. From point, I watched the batsman work four balls in a row with the spin to midwicket. Along came the fifth ball and Muggleton went well back to try and penetrate the on side, shaping to hit with the spin. He was in perfect position to negotiate an offbreak, but this time the ball fizzed from the leg. It had pitched middle and leg and hit the top of off stump. We all knew Frankish had a decided jerk in his bowling arm. He was once called for an alleged throw when playing for Western Australia in 1948.

What if an offie could perfect the ball without actually throwing it?

Personally I decided early in my career that I couldn't achieve bowling a legbreak with an offbreak action unless I chucked it, so I gave the idea away.

What I did need was a ball that shaped away from the right-hand batsman to beat the outside edge. I discovered that if you held the ball the same as for an offbreak, but delivered it in such a way that the seam is pointing towards square leg, and the back of your hand facing yourself, it will react much the same way as a leggie's ball out the front of the hand does: it hits the pitch and skids on straight.

Having bowled offies and leggies as a kid helped me understand how the offspinner's "square" one reacted almost identically to the legspinner's front-of-the hand ball.

Mostly it worked for me. My last Test wicket in Australia was England's Graham Gooch, at the MCG in 1980. I decided to set him up with the square spinner, which came out nicely and upon pitching, skipped off straight. The next ball was an offbreak that turned through a huge gap between bat and pad.

As a coach, I have showed quite a few top-notch spinners this delivery, including Graeme Swann and Daniel Vettori, both of whom cottoned on straight away. Later I showed John Davison, who in turn, as Nathan Lyon's mentor, passed the knowledge on.






The master: Clarrie Grimmett gave Ashley Mallett the best coaching lesson of his life © Associated Press


Since that Old Trafford Test match in 1956 when Jim Laker destroyed Australia, taking 19 for 90 for the game, offspin was the big attraction for me. Playing for Mt Lawley fourths in Perth grade cricket, I bowled offies and would keep bowling them until inevitably the day would come when they didn't bring enough wickets. So the next week I would bowl legbreaks.

When I was ten, my parents bought me a cricket book, entitled How to Bowl Them Out by Christopher Sly. In the section devoted to slow bowling there was an illustration of the grip for the offbreak. The index finger was to the left of the seam. The one-finger grip along the seam was the one I used until the day at the WACA nets when the coach of the WA Special Spin Squad, Tony Lock, advised me to change it.

He showed me how two fingers needed to be placed widely spaced so that I would have the advantage of spinning with both fingers. Lock said that the one-finger grip would be okay to continue to use as a variation, because often the ball didn't hit the wicket on the seam but would hit on the shiny part and skid straight on.

I learnt it was a good thing to vary how the ball was released: a topspinning offie, a little spin and undercut. However, I had no idea of the magic of flight.

Bob Simpson came to the club one day and I was asked to bowl to him. I was about 15 and had represented Western Australia in an interstate carnival in Adelaide, but bowling to Simpson was something else: it was akin to bowling to a barn door that had suddenly come alive and kept banging the ball back at me at the rate of knots.

I didn't dare bowl a leggie to Simpson, but I still practiced leggies in backyard "Tests". My older brother Nick always seemed to be batting and he was "Australia". I had to settle for "England". We wrote the team list and you had to bowl the same as the players. So if Laker was brought on, I would bowl offies, but if "Tich" Freeman was in action, I would bowl legspin.

In 1972 I finally caught up with Laker, my early hero, in England. He had a classic sideways action and bowled with a fairly high arm, although he seemed to undercut many of his deliveries, robbing himself of the dipping flight that other offspinners with high-arm actions, especially India's Erapalli Prasanna, achieved.

During a chat over a beer in a Nottingham pub, I asked Jim how he bowled his "away" ball. His normal offbreak grip involved spreading his index and middle fingers wide apart across the seam. For his away ball he changed his grip, having the seam run perpendicularly beneath his spinning fingers. Land the ball on the shiny side and it would often skid slightly away.



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Everything changed for me when I wrote to Clarrie Grimmett, the great Australian legspinner between the wars. I knew Grimmett had played 248 first-class matches and had bagged no less than 127 hauls of five wickets or more in an innings. Perhaps if I travelled to see him in Adelaide, he might help me find a better pathway to success.

At that time I was playing first grade for Mt Lawley and would bowl tightly but never got many people out. At first I thought it was my lot: a good bowler out of luck. Then I realised no one could keep having that much bad luck. After two and half days on the train from Perth I arrived at Grimmett's home, where he had a full-sized wicket in the backyard.

I bowled to him and it hit the middle of his Jack Hobbs bat. He walked towards me and declared: "Give up bowling, son, and become a batsman. I could play you blindfolded."

I produced a handkerchief and he laughed as he put it over his horn-rimmed glasses. My second ball met the middle of his bat.

When he stopped giggling, Clarrie gave me the best coaching lesson of my life.

"I suspect you are not getting many wickets because you are one-hand, one-paced, and you are bowling a trajectory which follows a pathway all the way from your hand to the pitch, and every ball is beneath the batsman's eyeline."



Mallett offers Malinga Bandara a few words of advice in Adelaide in 2006 David Hancock / © AFP





He said that if I were to stand on a bridge overlooking a motorway, it would be easy to judge where a car would be in a second or two, "because you are looking down on things".

"From a batsman's perspective, if the slow man operates on a flat trajectory, below the eyeline all the way, as soon as the ball leaves your hand, he knows exactly where it will land and he will move to hit it hard."

"If you happened to walk onto the motorway and stand in a manhole - don't try this, son - it would be far more difficult to judge when the car was arriving. Similarly, if the ball arrives hard-spun and above the eyeline, the batsman doesn't know precisely where it will land."

Grimmett emphasised that the key to spin bowling - legspin and offspin - was how the ball arrived, not where it landed.

He learnt to bowl a googly (also known as "bosey" and "wrong'un") by reading a magazine article about a legspinner wheeling them down at the beach. The legspinner found when he bowled on the beach that his front foot sank a little and the ball flipped out of the back of his hand not in the traditional leggie's style, over the wrist.



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Years ago I showed Geoff Lawson and Michael Kasprowicz the grip for the offbreak. Lawson wanted a different slower ball, so too Kasprowicz, who used his offie to great effect on the slow turning wickets in India.

I produced a handkerchief and Grimmett laughed as he put it over his horn-rimmed glasses. My second ball met the middle of his bat

WA and Test offspinner Bruce Yardley began his first-class career as a medium-paced bowler and hard-hitting lower-order batsman. As a medium-pacer his best ball was his change-up slower one, a hard-spun, dipping offbreak. He then switched to offspin and forged a successful Test career. All spinners must master the stock ball: hard-spun and dipping.

The more purchase on the ball, the greater the area of danger for the batsman. Shane Warne's area of danger was about as big as your average dining-room table, so too Muttiah Muralitharan's, for both men gave the ball an almighty rip.

In contrast, Ashley Giles, say, wasn't a big spinner of the ball, and his area of danger was about as big as a dinner plate. So Giles, in effect, had to be super-accurate compared with Warne and Murali - which, happily for him, he was; he fit in perfectly in the England Test team, building pressure as he held up one end for long periods and took key wickets.

Throughout cricket history there have been creative cricketers who have "invented" new deliveries such as the wrong'un, the flipper, the finger-flicked delivery (Jack Iverson), the square-spinner and the doosra. What I have loved about a few modern offies is that they have succeeded in finding ways to beat both sides of the bat other than by depending on natural variation or resorting to the doosra. Swann and R Ashwin are the two outstanding examples.

The possibilities of finding new and exciting ways of weaving a web over batsmen are never-ending.

Wednesday 10 June 2015

Will we see the Harbhajan of old?

Aakash Chopra in Cricinfo

India's leading offspinner of the 2000s fell away because of his tendency to overuse the doosra. Can he make enough of an impact in Bangladesh?


If he is to enjoy further success in international cricket, Harbhajan Singh must remember that the offbreak is his stock delivery, not the doosra © BCCI



There are a few boxes you want the ideal offspinner to tick:

1. Turns the ball
2. Gets the ball to drift in the air
3. Gets the ball to drop on the batsman
4. Extracts bounce
5. Has variations
6. Bowls an aggressive outside-off-stump line
7. Pitches fuller, enticing the batsman to drive off the front foot


About a decade and a half ago, when I first played the 17-year-old Harbhajan Singh, he had all of these qualities, even as a youngster. He was the perfect product of the SG Test ball, which offers a pronounced seam and allows the ball to grip the surface and, if maintained well, offers drift in the air too.

The key to achieving these attributes is that the ball must be delivered with the seam slightly tilted towards fine leg. That way it almost always lands half on the seam and half on the leather, and that allows it to grip and spin. If the position of the seam is maintained, the shine of the ball dictates that it drifts in the air, either away from the batsman or into him, depending which side the shine is on. The young Harbhajan was almost miraculously effective at this.

There were a few other things he could do that most of his peers couldn't. His high-arm action coupled with his height produced more bounce than other bowlers could, and so the fielders at short leg and backward short-leg were always in play. You couldn't simply offer a dead bat while defending, for the turn and bounce could take the ball in the direction of the two close-in catching fielders on the on side. Harbhajan would almost always bowl an aggressive outside-off-stump line and bowl full to entice the batsman to play against the spin, through the off side.

He was also the first high-profile Indian offspinner to bowl the doosra. But the good thing was that even when he had mastered it, the regular offbreak continued to be his stock ball, and it produced more wickets for him. The doosra was a surprise ball to keep the batsman guessing, and in any case, Harbhajan's doosra didn't go the other way as much as it did for the likes of Saqlain Mushtaq or Saeed Ajmal. That was a good thing, for it ensured that his focus was always on the stock ball. The only thing that he didn't have at 17 was the strength to sustain bowling quality for long periods. Once he achieved that, he became the complete bowler.

He flourished, the wickets came, and Harbhajan became an important cog in the Indian bowling unit - so much so that for some time he was the first spinner in the side, even when Anil Kumble was in the squad.

His problems arose when India played Test cricket in countries where the Kookaburra ball, which has a less pronounced seam, was used. Anyone who has grown up bowling with an SG ball faces serious issues adjusting to a ball that has close to no seam - like the Kookaburra when it is old. With no seam to grip the surface, you have to put more revolutions on the ball to get purchase off hard and bouncy surfaces.

Harbhajan couldn't quite master the Kookaburra in his heyday, but that wasn't the reason why he was dropped from the Indian team. The reason was the lack of zip in his offspinners, and a corresponding decline in his wicket-taking ability.

In his last five Tests, he has nine wickets at 63.88 apiece. These matches span three series - two at home against England and Australia, and one away against England.

Every player is a product of his conditioning, and Harbhajan was no different. He was always the first to reach the nets of Burlton Park in Jalandhar, was the last to leave, and bowled through the net session. He would bowl a lot of overs, and bowl a lot of orthodox offspin. That is how your bowling muscles are developed: the more you bowl, the better the ball comes out of the hand.



As T20 cricket took root, Harbhajan seemed to focus more on variations and lost his zing © BCCI





I think the reason his offies became less effective was that he didn't bowl enough of them in the nets and in matches. And that might have something to do with the introduction of T20 cricket and with playing a lot of one-day cricket. That's when it began to seem that Harbhajan had started focusing more on his variations than on traditional offspin.

His trajectory got lower, the speeds faster, and the line was more on the pads as opposed to outside off. He would bowl a lot of doosras and topspinners to minimise damage in the shorter format. Now, all of this was not unexpected - the demands of the shorter formats are such that most spinners go down that route when batsmen line them up to hit with the spin through the midwicket region; so if the ball holds its line or goes the other way, it becomes a little tougher for the batsman. But you need to be careful not to overdo the doosra, because you might lose your stock ball in the bargain. Also, there's still some merit in bowling slow in the shorter formats.

That's what Harbhajan did in the last season of the IPL, for Mumbai Indians. He was back to bowling a lot slower in the air, and the overwhelming majority of the deliveries he bowled were proper offbreaks. Now this could be because the doosra in general is less used on the circuit because of the crackdown against it, or the fact that Harbhajan almost always bowls the middle overs in a 20-over innings.

Even so, it was heartening to see glimpses of the old Harbhajan. Sterner tests await him now that he has made it back into the Indian Test side. His first assignment is the one-off Test match against Bangladesh. That will be played with a Kookaburra ball, and likely on a shirtfront. There will also be the small matter of another offspinner bowling from the other end, and comparisons will be inevitable. Comebacks after a certain age hang by a thin thread, so it's important he makes a mark in his first game back. Will Harbhajan do so?