5 Ways to be a better leg spinner
If I had to pick one type of bowler I love most it's the leg spinner.
As a keeper there is no greater pleasure than watching a good leg spinner bamboozle someone from behind the stumps. Plus the challenge of picking the variations is great fun.
But leg spin is not always encouraged as it should be.
Wickets are less spin friendly, coaches don't know how to teach the technique and captain's are unsympathetic to even good leggies.
So to try and redress the balance, Ryan Maron has come up with some quick tips to help you stay motivated as a leg spinner, even when you drag the occasional ball down and your captain gives you the skunk eye as the ball sails over deep midwicket.
Click here to view the tips.
If you like the tips and want more, Ryan Maron's Cricket School of Excellence offers coaching in Cape Town. Find out more at cricketschool.co.za
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articles seem to be being published later than usual for the past week or so. is this some new pattern or will things be back to normal soon?
Articles could go up any time of day. Mostly we put them up in the morning but you will get the odd day where it's later.
David - what do you reckon to this - So, maybe a point to consider is more communication with the wicket keeper and or captain. Off the back of this article The 3 golden rules of captaining leg spin | Cricket coaching, fitness and tips I was thinking that it might be a good idea to work far closer with my own captain and the wicket keeper. If you read the article he mentions the fact that if you bowl the wrong un you might do well to have a bloke behind square on the legside and as I mentioned I like a bloke at short fine leg as in my experience the wicket keepers can't see the wrong un coming till it's just missed the leg stump bails by a gnats whisker and is on it's way for 3 or a boundary. Maybe - rather than me deciding when the wrong un is going to be brought into action, the wicket keeper makes the decision in which case I could have a bloke at Gully who then on the wicket keepers instruction slopes off into the short fine leg position indicating that I then bowl the wrong un with the Keeper fully aware and a bloke there just in case it goes wrong?
Does that sound like a feasible plan? I have tried signals and things, but the keepers are a bit flummoxed if the ball then goes straight and to be honest I have enough going on in my head when I'm bowling without having to think about some seceret signal, that half the time the keeper misses because he's also concentrating on his game! Whereas Gully sloping off to Short Square leg behind the batsmans back seems fairly obvious?
Do you make plans with your wrist spinner and do you ever get to practice with him and therefore recognise his wrong un?
Dave
Dave,
The only way your keeper is going to be able to recognise your variations is if he practices keeping to them. It is as simple as that. There is no point you bowling a peach of a wrong un if the keeper doesn't know what hit him. At training, spend some time bowling to the keeper and show him your variations.
If you just move a fielder around each time you bowl one of your variations, the batsmen will eventually figure it out and you will lose the shock factor.
I've just started keeping to a leggie (who I also captain) and I'm already starting to pick his well disguised googly. So Alek is right, it is firstly a matter of practice and watching the ball from the hand very closely.
However, we did something very similar to your idea in out first game. We had no-one behind square on the leg side and he bowled his googly. We decided it would be risky to bowl it like that but to keep the space there until he was going to bowl it. The problem with that plan is that it becomes obvious very quickly to any batsman what you are doing, so he ended up not bowling his googly at all (which was fine in the circumstances).
So I would say, it's a good plan but only works once or twice. It's more important to get your keeper reading you (which you can learn with practice).
That's encouraging to hear that you've tried it David, yeah I realised that it's something you couldn't keep doing and the batsman at the other end would soon catch on and tell the other. On a different subject - what do you reckon to this as a drill http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM9lHQ1yi2A
Yes I love that type of practice, it is forcing you to bowl in a way that can come in very handy in a game. You can adapt it by moving the stumps further down the pitch and trying to land the ball over the first set, hitting the second set. (Forces you to get dip)
I live in India (Chennai) and captain a team consisting of software engineers playing on saturdays.
Let me say this, this website is a great service to anyone who loves cricket. I have already started prescribing this to friends like a preacher
Thank you for your kind words. We are happy to help!
Hi David.
I have a question.
I used to have a small delivery stride when I bowled but now I seem to have a huge stride and it's brought a few problems with it.
I had footage of my old action and compared it to my new action and I noticed a few things.
Old action my arm speed was a lot quicker compared to now would that play a role in why my stride is so big?
Also with a big stride comes the no ball problem and I was told from an early age that I had no reasons to bowl no balls being a leg spinner. I practise a lot and I still find myself overstepping time to time.
But I'll get to the point. In my recent video of me bowling I noticed that I'm not using my front arm. It's still high but I not pulling down with any force would this affect my bowling stride?