Turn, flight and parabola separate a genuine spinner from an ordinary one

Nagraj Gollapudi in Cricinfo 

Rajinder Goel, Padmakar Shivalkar and V V Kumar, three spinners who traumatised batsmen from the 1960s to the late-1980s, will be honoured by the BCCI on March 8 for their services to Indian cricket. Goel and Shivalkar, both left-arm spinners, will be given the CK Nayudu Lifetime Achievement Award. Kumar, a legspinner who played two Tests for India, will be given a special award for his "yeoman" service

In the following interview, the three talk about learning the basics of spin, their favourite practitioners of the art, and what has changed since their time.

What makes a good spinner?

Rajinder Goel -  Hard work, practice, and some intellect on how to play the batsman - these are mandatory. Without practice you will not be able to master line and length, which are key to defeat the batsman.

Padmakar Shivalkar  - Your basics of line and length need to be in place. The delivery needs to have a loop. This loop, which we used to call flight, needs to be a constant. Over the years, you increase this loop, adjust it. You lock the batsman first and then spread the web - he gets trapped steadily. But these things are not learned easily. It takes years and years of work before you reach the top level.

VV Kumar - There are many components involved. A spinner has to spend a lot of time in the nets. You can possibly become a spinner by participating in a practice session for a couple of hours. But you cannot become a real good spinner. A spinner must first understand what exactly is spinning the ball. A real spinner should possess the following qualities, otherwise he can only be termed a roller.

The number one thing is to have revolutions on the ball. Then you overspin your off- or legbreaks. There are two types when it comes to imparting spin: overspin and sidespin. A ball that is sidespun is mostly delivered with an improper action and is against the fundamentals of spin bowling. A real spinner will overspin his off- or legbreak, which, when it hits the ground, will have bounce, a lot of drift and turn. A sidespun delivery will only break - it will take a deviation. An overspun delivery will spin, bounce and then turn in or away sharply.

Then we come to control. The spinner needs to have control over the flight, the parabola. Flight does not mean just throwing the ball in the air. Flight means you spin the ball in such a way that you impart revolutions to the ball with the idea of breaking the ball to exhibit the parabola or dip. By doing that you put the batsman in two minds - whether he should come forward or stay back. But if the flight does not land properly, it can end up in a full toss.

The concept of a good spinner also includes bowling from over the wicket to both the right- and left-handed batsman. The present trend is for spinners to come round the wicket, which is negative and indicates you do not want to get punished. A spin bowler will have to give runs to get a wicket, but he should not gift it.

A spinner is not complete without mastering line and length. He must utilise the field to make the batsman play such strokes that will end up in a catch. That depends on the line he is bowling, his ability to flight the ball, to make the batsman come forward, or spin the ball to such an extent that the batsman probably tries to cut, pull, drive or edge. That is the culmination of a spinner planning and executing the downfall of a good batsman. For all this to happen, all the above fundamentals are compulsory. Turn, flight and parabola separate a genuine spinner from an ordinary spinner.



Shivalkar: "Vishy had amazing bat speed... he had a sharp eye. [Vijay] Manjrkear called him an artist" © Getty Images

Did you have a mentor who helped you become a good spinner?

Goel - Lala Amarnath. It was 1957. I was in grade ten. I was part of the all-India schools camp in Chail in Himachal Pradesh. He taught me the basics of spin bowling. The most important thing he taught me was to come across the umpire and bowl from close to the stumps. He said with that kind of action I would be able to use the crease well and could play with the angles and the length easily.

Kumar - I am self-taught, and I say that without any arrogance. I started practising by spinning a golf ball against the wall. It would come back in a different direction. The ten-year-old in me got curious from that day about how that happened. I started reading good books by former players, like Eric Hollies, Clarrie Grimmett and Bill O' Reilly. Of course, my first book was The Art of Cricket by Don Bradman. That is how I equipped myself with the knowledge and put it in practice with a ball in hand.

Shivalkar - It was my whole team at Shivaji Park Gymkhana who made me what I became. If there was a bad ball, and there were many when I was a youngster in 1960-61, I learned a lot from what senior players said, their gestures, their body language. [Vijay] Manjrekar, [Manohar] Hardikar, [Chandrakant] Patankar would tell me: "Shivalkar, watch how he [the batsman] is playing. Tie him up." "Kay kartos? Changli bowling tak [What are you doing? Bowl well]," they would say, at times widening their eyes, at times raising their voice. I would obey that, but I would tell them I was trying to get the batsman out. You cannot always prevail over the batsman, but I cannot ever give up, I would tell myself.


What was your favourite mode of dismissal?

Goel - My strength was to attack the pads. I would maintain the leg-and-middle line. Batsmen who attempted to sweep or tried to play against the spin, I had a good chance of getting them caught in the close-in positions, or even get them bowled. I used to get bat-pad catches frequently, so I would call that my favourite.


"Flight means you spin the ball in such a way that you impart revolutions to the ball with the idea of the breaking the ball to exhibit the dip. By doing that you put the batsman in two minds - whether he should come forward or stay back"
VV KUMAR

Kumar - My best way of getting a batsman out was to make him play forward and lure him to drive. Whether it was a quicker, flighted or flat delivery, I always tried to get the batsman on the front foot. Plenty of my wickets were caught at short leg, fine leg and short extra cover - that shows the batsman was going for the drives. I would not allow him to cut or pull. I would get these wickets through well-spun legbreaks, googlies, offspinners. You have to be very clear about your control and accuracy, otherwise you will be hit all over the place. You should always dominate the batsman. You have to play on his mind. Make him think it is a legbreak and instead he is beaten by flight and dip.

Shivalkar - I used to enjoy getting the batsman stumped. With my command over the loop, batsmen would step out of the crease and get trapped, beaten and stumped.


Tell us about one of your most prized wickets.

Goel - I was playing for State Bank of India against ACC (Associated Cement Companies) in the Moin-ud-Dowlah Gold Cup semi-finals in 1965 in Hyderabad. Polly saab [Polly Umrigar] was playing for ACC. He was a very good player of spin. He was playing well till our captain [Sharad] Diwadkar threw the second new ball to me. I got it to spin immediately and rapped Polly saab on the pads as he attempted to play me on the back foot. It was difficult to force a batsman like him to miss a ball, so it was a wicket I enjoyed taking.

Kumar - Let me talk about the wicket I did not get but one I cherish to this day. I was part of the South Zone team playing against the West Indians in January 1959 at Central College Ground in Bangalore. Garry Sobers came in to bat after I had got Conrad Hunte. I was thrilled and nervous to bowl to the best batsman. Gopi [CD Gopinath] told me to bowl as if I was bowling in any domestic match and not get bothered by the gifted fellow called Sobers.

The first ball was a legbreak, pitched outside off stump. Sobers moved across to pull me. Second ball was a topspinner, a full-length ball on the off stump. He went on the leg side and pushed it past point for four. The third ball was quickish, which he defended. Next, I delivered a googly on the middle stump. Garry came outside to drive, but the ball took the parabola and dipped. He checked his stroke and in the process sent me a simple, straightforward return catch. The ball jumped out of my hands. I put my hands on my head.



Goel: "There is no better spinner than Bishan Singh Bedi [in photo]. I was in awe of the flight he could impart on the ball. In contrast, I was rapid. Bedi was good on good pitches" © PA Photos


Who was the best spinner you saw bowl?

Goel - There is no better spinner than Bishan Singh Bedi. His high-arm action, the control he had over the ball, the way he would outguess a batsman - I loved Bedi's bowling. I was in awe of the flight he could impart on the ball. In contrast, I was rapid. Bedi was good on good pitches.

Kumar- I will call him my idol. I have not seen anybody else like Subhash Gupte, a brilliant legspinner. I have never seen anybody else reach his standards, including Shane Warne. Sobers himself said he was the best spinner he had ever played. In those days he operated on pitches that were absolutely dead tracks. It was Gupte's ability to adjust and adapt on any kind of surface, his perseverance and the variety he had - my goodness, no one came near to him! That is why he is the greatest spinner I have seen.


Who was the best player of spin you bowled against?

Goel - Ramesh Saxena [Delhi and Bihar] and Vijay Bhosle [Bombay] were two good players of spin. Saxena would never allow the ball to spin. He would reach out to kill the spin. Bhosle was similar, and used to be aggressive against spin.

Kumar - Vijay Manjrekar was probably the best player of spin I encountered. What made him great was the time he had at his disposal to play the ball so late. And by doing that he made the spinner look mediocre.

"No one offers the loop anymore. A consistent loop will always check the batsmen, in T20 too, and also get them out. But you have to be deceptive"
PADMAKAR SHIVALKAR


Shivalkar - [Gundappa] Viswanath. He could change his shot at the last moment. Once, I remember I thought I had him. He was getting ready to cut me on the off stump, but the ball dipped and turned into him. I nearly said "Oooh", thinking he would be either lbw or bowled. But Vishy had amazing bat speed and he managed to get the bat down and the edge whisked past fine leg. He ran two and then looked at me and smiled. He had a sharp eye. [Vijay] Manjrekar called him an artist. Vishy was a jaadugar [magician].


What has changed in spin bowling since the emergence of T20?

Goel - Earlier, we would flight the ball and not get bothered even if we got hit for four. We used to think of getting the batsman out. Now spinners think about arresting the runs. That is one big difference, which is an influence of T20.

Kumar - The three fundamentals I mentioned earlier do not exist in T20 cricket. Spinners are trying to bowl quick and waiting for the batsman to make the mistake. The spinner is not trying to make the batsman commit a mistake by sticking to the fundamentals. In four overs you cannot plan and execute.

Shivalkar - They have become defensive. No one offers the loop anymore. The difference has been brought upon by the bowlers themselves. A consistent loop will always check the batsmen, in T20 too, and also get them out. But you have to be deceptive. At times you should deliver from behind the popping crease, but you cannot allow the batsmen to guess that. That allows you more time for the delivery to land, for your flight to dip. The batsman is put in a fix. I have trapped batsmen that way.



Erapalli Prasanna (left), one of India's famed spin quartet, with Padmakar Shivalkar, who took 580 first-class wickets at 19.69 but never played a Test © AFP


We were playing for Tatas against Indian Oil [Corporation] in the Times Shield. Dilip Vengsarkar was standing at short extra cover. One batsman stepped out, trying to drive me, but Dilip took an easy catch. A couple of overs later he took another catch at the same spot. A third batsman departed in similar fashion in quick succession. Then a lower-order batsman played straight to Dilip, who dropped the catch as he was laughing at the ease with which I was getting the wickets. "Paddy, in my life I have never taken such easy catches," Dilip said, chuckling. The batsmen were not aware I was bowling from behind the crease. If they had noticed, they might have blocked it.

What is the one thing you cannot teach a spinner?

Goel-  Practice. Line, length and control can only be gained through a lot of hard practice. No one can teach that. Spin bowling is a natural talent. Every ball you have to think as a spinner - what you bowl, how you try and counter the strength or weakness of a batsman, read his reactions, whether he plays flight well and then I need to increase my pace, and such things. All these subtle things only come through practice.

Kumar - There is no such thing that cannot be taught.

Shivalkar - This game is a play of andaaz [style]. That andaaz can only be learned with experience.


What are the things that every spinner needs to have in his toolkit?

Goel - Firstly, you have to check where the batsman plays well, so you don't pitch it in his area. Don't feed to his strengths. You have to guess this quickly.


"It was Subhash Gupte's ability to adjust and adapt on any kind of surface, his perseverance and the variety he had - my goodness, no one came near to him!"
VV KUMAR


Kumar - A spinner should understand what line and length is before going into a match.

Shivalkar- You have to decide that on your own. What I have, what can I do are things only a spinner needs to understand on his own. For example, a batsman cuts me. Next time he tries, I push the ball in fast, getting him caught at the wicket or bowled.

What is beautiful about spin bowling?

Goel - When the ball takes a lot of turn and then goes on to beat the bat - it is beautiful.

Kumar - A spinner has a lot of tools to befuddle the batsman with and be a nuisance to him at all times. He has plenty in his repertoire, which make him satisfying to watch as well as make spin bowling a spectacle.

Shivalkar - When you get your loop right, the best batsman gets trapped. You take satisfaction from the fact that the ball might have dipped, pitched, taken the turn, and then, probably, turned in or out to beat the batsman. You can then say "Wah". You have Vishy facing you. You assess what he is doing and accordingly set the trap.

Pakistan Justice Javid Iqbal

The struggle to be British: my life as a second-class citizen

Ismail Einashe in The Guardian

I used my British passport for the first time on a January morning in 2002, to board a Eurostar train to Paris. I was taking a paper on the French Revolution for my history A-level and was on a trip to explore the key sites of the period, including a visit to Louis XIV’s chateau at Versailles. When I arrived at Gare du Nord I felt a tingle of nerves cascade through my body: I had become a naturalised British citizen only the year before. As I got closer to border control my palms became sweaty, clutching my new passport. A voice inside told me the severe-looking French officers would not accept that I really was British and would not allow me to enter France. To my great surprise, they did.

Back then, becoming a British citizen was a dull bureaucratic procedure. When my family arrived as refugees from Somalia’s civil war, a few days after Christmas 1994, we were processed at the airport, and then largely forgotten. A few years after I got my passport all that changed. From 2004, adults who applied for British citizenship were required to attend a ceremony; to take an oath of allegiance to the monarch and make a pledge to the UK.

These ceremonies, organised by local authorities in town halls up and down the country, marked a shift in how the British state viewed citizenship. Before, it was a result of how long you had stayed in Britain – now it was supposed to be earned through active participation in society. In 2002, the government had also introduced a “life in the UK” test for prospective citizens. The tests point to something important: being a citizen on paper is not the same as truly belonging. Official Britain has been happy to celebrate symbols of multiculturalism – the curry house and the Notting Hill carnival – while ignoring the divisions between communities. Nor did the state give much of a helping hand to newcomers: there was little effort made to help families like mine learn English.

But in the last 15 years, citizenship, participation and “shared values” have been given ever more emphasis. They have also been accompanied by a deepening atmosphere of suspicion around people of Muslim background, particularly those who were born overseas or hold dual nationality. This is making people like me, who have struggled to become British, feel like second-class citizens.

When I arrived in Britain aged nine, I spoke no English and knew virtually nothing about this island. My family was moved into a run-down hostel on London’s Camden Road, which housed refugees – Kurds, Bosnians, Kosovans. Spending my first few months in Britain among other new arrivals was an interesting experience. Although, like my family, they were Muslim, their habits were different to ours. The Balkan refugees liked to drink vodka. After some months we had to move, this time to Colindale in north London.

Colindale was home to a large white working-class community, and our arrival was met with hostility. There were no warm welcomes from the locals, just a cold thud. None of my family spoke English, but I had soon mastered a few phrases in my new tongue: “Excuse me”, “How much is this?”, “Can I have …?”, “Thank you”. It was enough to allow us to navigate our way through the maze of shops in Grahame Park, the largest council estate in Barnet. This estate had opened in 1971, conceived as a garden city, but by the mid-1990s it had fallen into decay and isolation. This brick city became our home. As with other refugee communities before us, Britain had been generous in giving Somalis sanctuary, but was too indifferent to help us truly join in. Families like mine were plunged into unfamiliar cities, alienated and unable to make sense of our new homes. For us, there were no guidebooks on how to fit into British society or a map of how to become a citizen.

My family – the only black family on our street – stuck out like a sore thumb. Some neighbours would throw rubbish into our garden, perhaps because they disapproved of our presence. That first winter in Britain was brutal for us. We had never experienced anything like it and my lips cracked. But whenever it snowed I would run out to the street, stand in the cold, chest out and palms ready to meet the sky, and for the first time feel the sensation of snowflakes on my hands. The following summer I spent my days blasting Shaggy’s Boombastic on my cherished cassette player. But I also realised just how different I was from the children around me. Though most of them were polite, others called me names I did not understand. At the playground they would not let me join in their games – instead they would stare at me. I knew then, aged 11, that there was a distance between them and me, which even childhood curiosity could not overcome.

Although it was hard for me to fit in and make new friends, at least my English was improving. This was not the case for the rest of my family, so they held on to each other, afraid of what was outside our four walls. It was mundane growing up in working-class suburbia: we rarely left our street, except for occasional visits to the Indian cash-and-carry in Kingsbury to buy lamb, cumin and basmati rice. Sometimes one of our neighbours would swerve his van close to the pavement edge if it rained and he happened to spot my mother walking past, so he could splash her long dirac and hijab with dirty water. If he succeeded, he would lean out of the window, thumbs up, laughing hysterically. My mother’s response was always the same. She would walk back to the house, grab a towel and dry herself.

At secondary school in Edgware, the children were still mostly white, but there was a sizeable minority of Sikhs and Hindus. My new classmates would laugh at how I pronounced certain English words. I couldn’t say “congratulations” properly, the difficult part being the “gra”. I would perform saying that word, much to the amusement of my classmates. As the end of term approached, my classmates would ask where I was going on holiday. I would tell them, “Nowhere”, adding, “I don’t have a passport”.

When I was in my early teens, we were rehoused and I had to move to the south Camden Community school in Somers Town. There, a dozen languages were spoken and you could count the number of white students in my year on two hands. There was tension in the air and pupils were mostly segregated along ethnic lines – Turks, Bengalis, English, Somalis, Portuguese. Turf wars were not uncommon and fights broke out at the school gates. The British National party targeted the area in the mid-1990s, seeking to exploit the murder of a white teenager by a Bengali gang. At one point a halal butcher was firebombed.

Though I grew up minutes from the centre of Europe’s biggest city, I rarely ventured far beyond my own community. For us, there were no trips to museums, seaside excursions or cinema visits. MTV Base, the chicken shop and McDonald’s marked my teen years. I had little connection to other parts of Britain, beyond the snippets of middle-class life I observed via my white teachers. And I was still living with refugee documents, given “indefinite leave to remain” that could still be revoked at some future point. I realised then that no amount of identification with my new-found culture could make up for the reality that, without naturalisation, I was not considered British.

At 16, I took my GCSEs and got the grades to leave behind one of the worst state schools in London for one of the best: the mixed sixth form at Camden School for Girls. Most of the teens at my new school had previously attended some of Britain’s best private schools – City of London, Westminster, Highgate – and were in the majority white and middle-class.

It was strange to go from a Muslim-majority school to a sixth form where the children of London’s liberal set attended: only a mile apart, but worlds removed. I am not certain my family understood this change. My cousins thought it was weird that I did not attend the local college, but my old teachers insisted I go to the sixth form if I wanted to get into a good university. A few days after starting there, I got my naturalisation certificate, which opened the way for me to apply for my British passport.

Around the time I became a British citizen, the political mood had started to shift. In the summer of 2001, Britain experienced its worst race riots in a generation. These riots, involving white and Asian communities in towns in the north-west of England, were short but violent. They provoked a fraught public conversation on Muslims’ perceived lack of integration, and how we could live together in a multi-ethnic society. This conversation was intensified by the 9/11 attacks in the US. President George W Bush’s declaration of a “war on terror” created a binary between the good and the bad immigrant, and the moderate and the radical Muslim. The London bombings of 7 July 2005 added yet more intensity to the conversation in Britain. 

Politicians from across the spectrum agreed that a shared British identity was important, but they couldn’t agree on what that might be. In 2004, the Conservative leader Michael Howard had referred to “The British dream” when speaking about his Jewish immigrant roots. After 2005, he wrote in the Guardian that the tube attacks had “shattered” complacency about Britain’s record on integration. Britain had to face “the terrible truth of being the first western country to have suffered terrorist attacks perpetrated by ‘home-grown’ suicide bombers – born and educated in Britain”. Many commentators questioned whether being a Muslim and British were consistent identities; indeed whether Islam itself was compatible with liberal democracy.

Howard defined a shared identity through institutions such as democracy, monarchy, the rule of law and a national history. But others argued that making a checklist was a very un-British thing to do. Labour’s Gordon Brown, in a 2004 article for the Guardian, wrote that liberty, tolerance and fair play were the core values of Britishness. While acknowledging such values exist in other cultures and countries, he went on to say that when these values are combined together they make a “distinctive Britishness that has been manifest throughout our history and has shaped it”.

For me, at least, becoming a British citizen was a major milestone. It not only signalled that I felt increasingly British but that I now had the legal right to feel this way.

But my new identity was less secure than I realised. Only a few months after my trip to Paris, the Blair government decided to use a little-known law – the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act – to revoke the citizenship of naturalised British persons, largely in terrorism cases. Before 1914, British citizenship, once obtained, could only be given up voluntarily by an individual, but that changed with the advent of the first world war. According to the Oxford politics professor Matthew Gibney, the 1914 act was a response to anti-German sentiment and fears about the loyalty of people with dual British-German citizenship. A further law, passed in 1918, created new and wide-ranging grounds to revoke citizenship.

In theory, since 1918, the home secretary has had the power to remove a naturalised person or dual-nationality-holder’s British citizenship if it was considered “conducive to the public good”, but a 1981 law prevented them from doing so if it made the person stateless. Since 9/11, that restraint has been gradually abandoned.

In 2006, the home secretary was given further powers to revoke British citizenship. At the time, the government sought to allay concerns about misuse of these powers. “The secretary of state cannot make an order on a whim,” the home office minister Angela Eagle had said when the law was first proposed, “and he will be subject to judicial oversight when he makes an order”.

Although the post-9/11 measures were initially presented as temporary, they have become permanent. And the home secretary can strip people of their citizenship without giving a clear reason. No court approval is required, and the person concerned does not need to have committed a crime. The practice is growing. Under Labour, just five people had their citizenship removed, but when Theresa May was at the Home Office, 70 people were stripped of their citizenship, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Yet these near-arbitrary powers have caused remarkably little concern.

 

‘Before, citizenship was a result of how long you had stayed in Britain, but now it was supposed to be earned through active participation in society.’

People have largely accepted these new powers because they are presented as a way to keep the country safe from terrorism. After 9/11, the public became more aware of the Islamist preachers who had made London their home in the preceding decades. Abu Hamza, who was then the imam of Finsbury Park mosque, and became a notorious figure in the media, was, like me, a naturalised British citizen. For several years as a teenager, I attended the Finsbury Park mosque. It was small; I remember the smell of tea, incense and feet that greeted you every time you walked in. I also remember the eclectic mix of worshippers who visited – Algerians, Afghans, Somalis and Moroccans. Unlike Muslims of south-Asian background, few of these people had longstanding colonial ties to Britain. Most had fled civil war in their home countries, while some of the North Africans had left France because they felt it treated Muslims too harshly. The mosque was not affiliated with the Muslim Association of Britain, and its preachers promoted a Salafi form of Islam.

I remember Abu Hamza as a larger-than-life character, whose presence dominated mosque life, especially at Friday prayers when he would go into very long sermons – usually about the dangers of becoming too British. Attending this mosque was like being cocooned from the realities of modern life. I recall Abu Hamza once going off about how, as young Muslim teens, we were not to follow the “kuffar” in their habit of engaging in premarital sex. For much of my teens, this mosque held a kind of control over me, based on fear. That changed when I moved to my new sixth form and felt able to start exploring the world for myself, and began to realise that I could be secular, liberal and humanist.

I went in one direction, but other people I knew chose different paths. Before 2001, I don’t recall many women wearing the niqab, but as the years wore on it became a more common sight on the streets of London. My sister even began to wear one – contrary to media stereotypes of women being coerced, she chose to, as did many of the young women I had gone to school with. The way that young Muslims practised Islam in Britain changed, in line with global developments. They dropped the varied cultural baggage of their parents’ versions of the religion and began a journey to a distinct British Islam – something that connected the Somali refugee and the second-generation Bangladeshi, the Irish and Jamaican converts.

Some of the white working-class kids I grew up with converted to Islam. Daniel became Yusef and Emma became Khadija. Before I knew it, they were giving me advice about how Muslims should behave. I observed this role reversal with amusement. One boy in particular would preach to me while incessantly saying “bruv”. I also saw the young men I had grown up with move away from a life sat on bikes wearing hoods under bridges in Camden listening to grime, to practising their Islam more visibly. Out went the sneaky pints, spliffs and casual sex. Now it was beards, sermons about the faith and handing out Islamic leaflets on street corners. But I did not heed their words. When I was 16 I stopped attending the mosque and I began to question my faith.

Mahdi Hashi was one of the young men I grew up with. Hashi was another child refugee from Somalia. As a teenager he used to complain that he was being followed by the British security services. He said they wanted to make him an informant. Hashi was not alone. In 2009, he and other young Muslim men from Camden took their allegations to the press. One said that a man posing as a postal worker turned up at his door and told him that if he did not cooperate with the security services, then his safety could not be guaranteed if he ever left Britain.

For most newcomers, citizenship is not just confirmation of an identity, it is also about protection: that you will be guaranteed rights and treated according to the law. Hashi lost that protection. In 2009, he left for Somalia because, his family say, of harassment by the security services. In June 2012, his family received a letter informing them that he was to lose his British citizenship. Later that summer Hashi turned up in Djibouti, a tiny former French colony on the Red Sea. He was arrested. He alleges that he was threatened with physical abuse and rape if he did not cooperate with authorities in Djibouti – and he alleges that US officials questioned him. In November 2012, he was given over to the Americans and taken to the US without any formal extradition proceedings. In 2016, Hashi was sentenced in New York to nine years in prison for allegedly supporting the jihadist group al-Shabaab. He will be deported to Somalia upon his release.

Hashi’s case is not unique. Bilal Berjawi, who came to Britain from Lebanon as a child, had his British citizenship revoked in 2012 and was killed in a US drone strike on the outskirts of Mogadishu. His friend Mohamed Sakr, who held dual British-Egyptian nationality, was also killed by a drone strike in Somalia after he had been stripped of his UK citizenship. Together with a third friend, the two young men had visited Tanzania in 2009 on what they claimed was a safari trip, but were arrested, accused of trying to reach Somalia and returned to the UK. The third friend was Mohammed Emwazi, now better known as the Isis executioner “Jihadi John”.

The war in Syria, and the attraction that Isis and other jihadist groups hold for a small minority of British Muslims, has led to a further increase in citizenship-stripping. In 2013 Theresa May, who was then home secretary, removed the citizenship of 13 people who had left for Syria. The government has a duty to protect people, but the tool it is using will have wider, damaging consequences.

The right of newcomers to be considered fully British has been a long struggle. The first border controls of the 20th century were introduced to stop the movement of “alien” Jewish refugees from eastern Europe. In 1948, the British Nationality Act gave citizenship to anyone who had been a subject of empire, but those black and Asian migrants who took up the offer – indeed, who often thought of themselves as British – were met with shocking racism: with “no Irish, no blacks, no dogs”. The 1962 Immigration Act began to limit the citizenship rights of people from the non-white colonies, and by the 1982 Act it was all over.

Now we are caught in a paradox, where the state is demanding more effort than ever on the part of the migrant to integrate, but your citizenship is never fully guaranteed. Fifteen years on from the events of 9/11, gaining British citizenship is a much tougher process. And becoming a naturalised citizen is no longer a guarantee against the political whims of the day: you are, in effect, a second-class citizen. Citizenship-stripping is now a fixture of the state, and it is defended in the usual vein, which is to say: “If you have not done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” The usual caveat is that this concerns terrorists and criminals – a red herring that masks the true purpose of such laws, which is to empower the state at the expense of ordinary people. The philosopher Hannah Arendt memorably described citizenship as “the right to have rights”, but for people of migrant background such as myself, this is being eroded. We are not a small group: according to the 2011 census, there are 3.4 million naturalised Brits.

As I was writing this piece, Donald Trump issued his executive order that bans people from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Somalia, from entering the US – even if they hold dual nationality. I happened to be visiting New York at the time, and the ban has left me wondering if I will ever be allowed to again. Despite assurances from Britain’s government, it remains unclear whether the ban applies to people who hold a British passport, but were born overseas. Trump’s ban did not happen in a vacuum: there is a thread linking the anti-terror policies of western governments and this extreme new step.

Today, I no longer feel so safe in my status as a naturalised British citizen, and it is not just the UK. In other liberal democracies such as Australia and Canada, moves are under way to enable citizenship-stripping – sending people like me a clear message that our citizenship is permanently up for review.

What does focus mean in cricket ?

Simon Barnes in Cricinfo

Cricketers are always talking about focus. So is everybody else in big-time sport. You hear more talk about focus from professional athletes than you do from professional photographers. The difference is that when photographers mention it, there's a general agreement on what they are talking about.

"Hard work, sacrifice and focus will never show up in tests," said Lance Armstrong, making focus unlike most of the other stuff he used. Focus has become a magic word, one used to explain every half-decent performance in sport.

It has also become an interview staple - the right answer to almost any question.

"How do you feel about the shattering on-pitch row that took place today?"

"I just try and stay focused on my batting."

It's a rebuff to the interviewer, a statement of intent and a personal call to order: what matters here is not your story but my batting.

Focus reflects the idea that you can train your mind, that your mind is as much an instrument of the will as your body

Focus takes in every part of modern sport. It is used in the minutiae of action. A batsman's first job is to focus on the ball, and that involves literal and metaphorical use of the word. Batting is first about looking at the ball - some batsmen mutter "watch the ball" every single time. But there is also a figurative focus. You confine your attention to the action, refusing to get distracted by sledging fielders, the fact that the team is 108 for 7, and that you haven't made double figures for the last five innings.

From here the idea of focus expands beyond the immediate action and takes you to the mindset of the professional athlete. This fearsome thing combines a horror of the past with a straw-clutching concentration on the future. For some, this is a natural state, for others, one that requires painful effort.

Either way, the idea is that concentrating - focusing - on the past is counterproductive. Memories of both success and failure are equally damaging. All that matters is the next match. "I prefer to focus on what is coming next," said the racing driver, Sebastian Vettel, spelling out the way professional athletes school themselves to think.

Focus reflects the idea that you can train your mind, that your mind is as much an instrument of the will as your body. Both can be improved by coaching and training and sheer bloody effort. You can school yourself to "focus on the positives".

While everyone watches you, you watch the ball © Getty Images

So after a horrendous defeat, you talk about the good things it involved. Tim Henman, the British tennis player, was a master at this. "But there's a lot of positive I can take from this," he would say, before leaving Wimbledon at the semi-final stage once again. A focused individual chooses what kind of defeat he endures. The best make defeat a stepping stone to victory. Tim never quite did, of course, but we British never stopped loving him.

Focus can operate over a still wider field. You keep your focus not just on the ball or on the future or on the positives. You also keep focus on your entire life. Don't let outside distractions affect you. Stay focused on football or cricket or running.

So if you shift your focus from golf to cocktail waitresses, you end up like Tiger Woods. The conventional view of Tiger's troubles is that he lost his focus. The fact of the matter is that he had his life in perfect balance. What threw him off was getting found out.
That's because there is a contradiction in the idea of focus. It is normally understood as unrelenting concentration on a single thing, but batsmen maintain their focus by constantly going out of focus. The key to a long innings, as all batsmen will explain, is "switching off" between balls and at the non-striker's end.

The focused athlete has become part of 21st-century mythology - a perfect example of what we all need to do if we are to become more successful people

In the same way, many male athletes improve dramatically when they become fathers. The loss of focus actually helps. Sport is no longer the only thing or even the most important thing in life. The consequent lessening of intensity - of focus - becomes a positive asset.

Focus has become part of the survival kit of the modern athlete. The focused athlete has become part of 21st-century mythology - a perfect example of what we all need to do if we are to become more successful people. The image (preferably in sharp focus) of a sprinter at the start of a race or, a footballer making contact with the ball, or a batsman in the instant before the ball arrives - these seem to reveal important truths about the way life should be lived. Only focus, and the world is yours!

The myth is that once you have achieved focus you can do just about anything. The word has acquired an almost religious significance, a mystic state of perfect attainment. That's mostly because it can mean more or less anything you choose.

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.



****



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

 

Read more

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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