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.

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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.

Now a degree is a commodity, no wonder more students are cheating

Poppy Noor in The Guardian

It was reported this week that the Department for Education is considering new penalties for students who plagiarise essays. This comes after an investigation by the Times in 2016 found that 50,000 students had been caught cheating on their university degrees in the three years before.

Students were paying anywhere between £100 and £6,750 for an essay, and this widespread cheating has led to suggestions that criminal records could be dished out to offenders. But with a generation now forking out in excess of £50,000 for their degrees, is anybody surprised that a university education now feels like another asset that can simply be bought?

Since the 1990s, when Tony Blair brought in tuition fees, a number of changes have been introduced that have made the decision of whether or not to go to university more about your ability to afford it (or at least not be put off by the cost) and less about your desire to learn.

Fees have increased – in the most extreme cases nearly tenfold – since they were introduced, and bursaries have been removed for the poorest students, meaning that those without family money will inevitably end up paying more, as it will take them longer to pay off their loans.

This sends a very clear message to students: your money is just as important as your mind. The right grades aren’t enough to get you into university. You need the cash (or loan) to pay for it in the first place. Buying essays – any form of plagiarism – is clearly wrong, but it feels like the logical extension of an education that comes with a high and rising price tag.

Don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot at university. I went because I loved the subject that I wanted to study, I was hungry for more knowledge, and I wanted to self-improve. But for a lot of people, that’s not what university is for. The government itself, since the introduction of tuition fees, has justified them on the basis that students will end up earning more if they go to university – and so, for many, a degree feels like a route to a career rather than an opportunity to learn.

Employers have bought into the idea that university can simply be used as a proxy for employability, as is shown by the minimum 2:1 threshold required for most jobs, despite this not necessarily correlating with better performance at work. For students who feel they’re just buying a rubber stamp, what’s the point in putting in the effort?

Plan to crack down on websites selling essays to students announced

 

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If you plan to purchase, rather than partake in your degree, purely so you can meet that minimum 2:1 requirement, there are many ways to blag your way through it that require much less than a critical mind. You read your pre-decided list of writers, normally white male authors who have been on the list for years – often past the time when their novels felt culturally relevant or their theories genuinely held water. In fact, you don’t even have to read these writers – you can just go on SparkNotes and find a summary. Then you make some mundane criticisms that have probably been made by many others before – because, for some reason, no matter how many times students write the same essay on how Marx didn’t anticipate the resilience of capitalism, it’s apparently still worth saying. And then you move on to the next essay.

When large amounts of money are necessary to attend university, and degrees are described more and more often simply as a route to a profitable job, it’s not surprising that a pure interest in education is jettisoned.

It’s for this reason that I find the sudden dismay about all this cheating a bit of a joke. Of course action should be taken – cheating is a serious offence. But before we lament a situation in which thousands of students waste their time and opportunities by plagiarising rather than actually learning, we might want to ask how we got into this position in the first place. The £50,000 cost of a degree, rather than the comparative pennies spent on stolen essays, might be the first place to look.

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Blair is right on Brexit: parliament must have a democratic debate

Anatole Kaletsky in The Guardian

Former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s recent call for voters to think again about leaving the EU, echoed in parliamentary debates ahead of the government’s official launch of the process in March, is an emperor’s new clothes moment. Although Blair is now an unpopular figure, his voice, like that of the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, is loud enough to carry above the cabal of flatterers assuring Theresa May that her naked gamble with Britain’s future is clad in democratic finery.

The importance of Blair’s speech can be gauged by the hysterical overreaction to his suggestion of reopening the Brexit debate, even from supposedly objective media: “It will be seen by some as a call to arms – Tony Blair’s Brexit insurrection,” according to the BBC.

Such is the tyranny of the majority in post-referendum Britain that a “remainer” proposal for rational debate and persuasion is considered an insurrection. And anyone questioning government policy on Brexit is routinely described as an “enemy of the people,” whose treachery will provoke “blood in the streets.”

What explains this sudden paranoia? After all, political opposition is a necessary condition for functioning democracy – and nobody would have been shocked if Eurosceptics continued to oppose Europe after losing the referendum, just as Scottish nationalists have continued campaigning for independence after their 10-point referendum defeat in 2014. And no one seriously expects US opponents of Donald Trump to stop protesting and unite with his supporters.

The difference with Brexit is that last June’s referendum subverted British democracy in two insidious ways. First, the leave vote was inspired mainly by resentments unconnected with Europe. Second, the government has exploited this confusion of issues to claim a mandate to do anything it wants.

Six months before the referendum, the EU did not even appear among the 10 most important issues facing Britain as mentioned by potential voters. Immigration did rank at the top, but, as Blair noted in his speech, anti-immigration sentiment was mainly against multicultural immigration, which had little or nothing to do with the EU. The leave campaign’s strategy was therefore to open a Pandora’s box of resentments over regional imbalances, economic inequality, social values and cultural change. The remain campaign completely failed to respond to this, because it concentrated on the question that was literally on the ballot, and addressed the costs and benefits of EU membership.

The fact that the referendum was such an amorphous but all-encompassing protest vote explains its second politically corrosive effect. Because the leave campaign successfully combined a multitude of different grievances, May now claims the referendum as an open-ended mandate. Instead of arguing for controversial Conservative policies – including corporate tax cuts, deregulation, unpopular infrastructure projects and social security reforms – on their merits, May now portrays such policies as necessary conditions for a “successful Brexit”. Anyone who disagrees is dismissed as an elitist “remoaner” showing contempt for ordinary voters.

Making matters worse, the obvious risks of Brexit have created a siege mentality. “Successful Brexit” has become a matter of national survival, turning even the mildest proposals to limit the government’s negotiating options – for example, parliamentary votes to guarantee rights for EU citizens already living in Britain – into acts of sabotage.

As in wartime, every criticism shades into treason. That is why the Labour party has collaborated in defeating all parliamentary efforts to moderate May’s hardline Brexit plans, even on such relatively uncontentious issues as visa-free travel, pharmaceutical testing or science funding. Likewise, more ambitious demands from Britain’s smaller opposition parties for a second referendum on the final exit deal have gained no traction, even among committed pro-Europeans, who are intimidated by the witch-hunting atmosphere against unrepentant remainers.

Sir Ivan Rogers, who was forced to resign last month as the UK’s permanent representative to the EU because he questioned May’s negotiating approach, predicted this week a “gory, bitter, and twisted” breakup between Britain and Europe. But this scenario is not inevitable. A more constructive possibility is now emerging along the lines suggested by Blair. Instead of vainly trying to influence May’s hardline stance in the negotiations, the new priority should be to restart a rational debate about Britain’s relationship with Europe and to convince the public that this debate is democratically legitimate.

This means challenging the idea that a referendum permanently outweighs all other mechanisms of democratic politics and persuading voters that a referendum mandate refers to a specific question in specific conditions, at a specific time. If the conditions change or the referendum question acquires a different meaning, voters should be allowed to change their minds.

The process of restoring a proper understanding of democracy could start within the next few weeks. The catalyst would be amendments to the Brexit legislation now passing through parliament. The goal would be to prevent any new relationship between Britain and the EU from taking effect unless approved by a parliamentary vote that allowed for the possibility of continuing EU membership. Such an amendment would make the status quo the default option if the government failed to satisfy parliament with the new arrangements negotiated over the next two years. It would avert the Hobson’s choice the government now proposes: either accept whatever deal we offer, or crash out of the EU with no agreed relationship at all.

Allowing parliament to decide about the new relationship with Europe, instead of leaving it entirely up to May, would restore the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. More important, it would legitimise a new political debate in Britain about the true costs and benefits of EU membership, possibly leading to a second referendum on the government’s Brexit plans.

This is precisely why May vehemently opposes giving parliament any meaningful voice on the outcome of the Brexit negotiations. Presumably, she will block any such requirement from being attached to the Brexit legislation in March. But that may not matter: if a genuine debate about Brexit gets restarted, democracy will prevent her from closing it down.