Wrist Spin Bowling (part Five)

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Cleanprophet said:
They are one and the same if you believe that a side-spinner and a leg spinner are one and the same. Same action, but different wrist position. As I explained, Jenner says the idea is to flick the wrist so that your thumb faces back towards you with the palm of your hand facing the off-side. Warne is showing a smaller flick which leaves the thumb pointing to the off-side and the palm facing the ground/batter. The difference, in theory, is that one imparts a little bit of side-spin and the other imparts backspin. Jenner called this backspinner a slider. But many bowlers (Warne included) refer to this ball out of the front of the hand as the slider. They are different deliveries.

Warne bluffed so much that he may have called described the slider as the zooter. It's tricky to tell because he often moves the ball around in his hand as he describes the delivery and it isn't clear at all in which direction he is suggesting the balls spins. From what I've seen, he has only ever shown and described the ball coming out of the front of the hand. The only footage I've seen of anyone showing a backspinning action is that one Jenner did for the BBC, where you clearly see him suggesting that the hand flicks back towards the bowler and imparts backspin. I've never seen a close up of this release in genuine action. It would be nice to see it and put all this to bed once and for all.
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Shouldn't you back in wrongun school mate.

That Jenner backspin demo was just him having a joke. At that stage Terry was being paid big bucks by the English to coach legspin and being paid secret bucks by the Aussies to spread as much disinformation as possible. That is how you ended up with Borthwick bowling legspin on the SCG for England when he wouldn't make my sons club team.

Jenner had to keep inventing nonsense to justify the huge amounts of money he was extracting every English summer as he was being paid to find crickets equivalent of the abominable snowman, an Englishman that could bowl Legspin. He knew it was an impossible task but gladly accepted the cash. Remember he was a convicted fraudster who went to gaol.
 
Spin Lizard said:
So Jenner, Warne's mentor, describes a "legbreak gone wrong", a delivery called the slider. And Warne describes a different delivery, also called the slider (but doesn't describe Jenner's slider). And they both behave remarkably like a ball that Ring showed Benaud in 1953, with an apple, on the train to Bristol:



OLSGUSDS - the orthodox legspin grip upspinning downshooter. Otherwise known as the reverse-fingered slipper, or the Philpott circus ball.

Legspin theory is just so complicated and tricky, I'm glad I bowl left arm spin.
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The ball that slides out of the front of the hand (the one that Benaud says comes out between the middle finger and the spinning finger - effectively, the spinning finger does not rip over the top of the ball and impart spin, therefore it slides out and goes straight) has no backspin at all, despite what anyone says. Certainly, it has no backspin of any note. It has pretty much no spin at all.

If you see the BBC clip of Jenner, he almost produced a reverse of the top spinner with the wrist flicking towards the bowler and not towards the batter. That would impart backspin, if it could be bowled properly.

macca said:
That Jenner backspin demo was just him having a joke.
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There's no doubt that a ball could be bowled with a reverse top spin action. Warne tried a backspinner in a Test match in the West Indies (albeit with a different, non-leg-spin, grip) with the hand flicking back towards the bowler. Whether it could be bowled effectively, I don't know. I''m not going to spend the time trying to find out when the flipper does the job already.
 
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Cleanprophet said:
The ball that slides out of the front of the hand (the one that Benaud says comes out between the middle finger and the spinning finger - effectively, the spinning finger does not rip over the top of the ball and impart spin, therefore it slides out and goes straight) has no backspin at all, despite what anyone says. Certainly, it has no backspin of any note. It has pretty much no spin at all.
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What makes you say that? Sliding your fingers down the back of the ball creates a whole load of backspin.
 
leftie600 said:
There's no doubt that a ball could be bowled with a reverse top spin action.
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Well there has been plenty of doubt about such a ball expressed here lately. leftie600 said it was impossible (except for him off course because he is one of those sly kiwi iverson merchants) and SLA hasn't seen one and he has viewed the slo mo footage of every legbreak bowled in 20 years of first class cricket in every country in the world.

Give up son, there aint no backspinner off the wrist out there. All you need is a legbreak and a straight one. Why would you want backspin anyway? Grimmett wrote in all his books that a legbreak needed a big dose of topspin to beat the best players. Backspin is to be used as a rare variation when all else fails.

Peter Percy Philpott convinced himself that Benaud was bowling pure seam up off the wrist backspinners. Philpott tried to do it in a test in 1966 and got dropped from the Australian cricket team. It is just an aussie joke that got out of hand on the bbc with terry jenner. He is the rolf harris of world cricket right now thanks to the team at bigcricket. Well done boys.
 
macca said:
leftie600 said it was impossible (except for him off course because he is one of those sly kiwi iverson merchants) and SLA hasn't seen one and he has viewed the slo mo footage of every legbreak bowled in 20 years of first class cricket in every country in the world.
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Just for everyone I bowled a few Iverson OBS' at practice tonight, I feel almost obliged to bowl them every time I get to my mark now.
 
leftie600 said:
Just for everyone I bowled a few Iverson OBS' at practice tonight, I feel almost obliged to bowl them every time I get to my mark now.
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God you armstrong flickers are smug. Just 'cause you have every concievable delivery at your fingertips due to your confounded grip no need to rub our noses in it.
 
macca said:
Why would you want backspin anyway?
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There's really only one reason why you would want backspin on the ball and that's for carry through the air, not really for anything it would do off the pitch. The problem is that you need a fair bit of revs on a delivery to get it do anything through the air, whether that is dip, drift or carry.

If you think about Murali, he used a flick of the wrist as well as his fingers to impart offspin. He flicks his wrist in the opposite direction that a leg-spinner does. Try to do it yourself and you are likely to do damage to your wrist. Murali can do it because he is double-jointed in his wrist and in his shoulder. He could bowl the backspinner with a legspinner's grip and impart enough backspin to get decent carry, but most mortals would not be able to get enough of a flick to get anywhere near enough revs.

You are right. You really only need a leg-spinner and a top-spinner. If you asked me would I rather have 4 or 5 deliveries that I bowled reasonably well or a legspinner that I bowled superbly, it's a no-brainer.
 
SLA said:
What makes you say that? Sliding your fingers down the back of the ball creates a whole load of backspin.
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I'm not convinced you create very much back spin without the wrist flicking in the direction you are trying to spin the ball. Besides which, I don't think the fingers slide down the back of the ball very much, if at all.
 
Spin Lizard said:
Has anybody mentioned Clarrie Grimmett's 'wrong wrong-uns' yet?
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Yeah that one has had a good run here a few times. Grimmett's 5th flipper and third wrongun. "If I twisted my hand right over as for the googly I could make the ball turn from the leg, in what I called a wrong wrongun. Coming out of the back of the hand it usually deceived a batsman, but it was so slow off the pitch that he had plenty of time to play it".

Mallett in his Grimmett biography reckons Clarrie was still working on it up until his seventies on his backyard pitch. I asked Jenner about it when TJ would answer emails from his blog and he reckons he knew about it and could do it but not over 22 yards.

Someblokecalledave worked it out for himself after he learnt the flipper.
 
Cleanprophet, the point isn't to get revs or carry or anything else, the point is to deceive the batsman.

As Benaud said, looks like a legbreak but has a hint of backspin so it skids on straight.

The point of the second wrongun is to fool the batsman who can pick the first one.

Fool the batsman, don't fool yourself.
 
Spin Lizard said:
Cleanprophet, the point isn't to get revs or carry or anything else, the point is to deceive the batsman
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Well, that was exactly what I was thinking when I mentioned getting movement on the ball through the air. Drift and dip are the major weapons of any leg spinner because they deceive the batter in the air. If you can get a ball to carry you will catch the batter back on his stumps as he steps back to play a short delivery that isn't short at all.
 
"A ball can be made to leave the pitch slowly by means of back-spin. This is done by pulling the top of the ball back with the fingers, or by applying my flipper. The faster this ball is bowled through the air the more effective it will be, because the batsman is more likely to play forward. Then, because of the back-spin, he will play the bat through too quickly, and may put up a catch."

That is Grimmett on backspin for legbreak bowlers but only to used when all else fails. " I had long since decided it was useless bowling any ball without topspin to the best batsmen except as an occasional variation"

Philpott on the other hand invests the backspinner he reckons you can get with a legbreak action with more powers than a cartoon bullet. He reckoned Benaud was bowling up to 80% backspinners on some wickets!
 
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