Monday night and Ben does karate and me and Joe sneak into an empty bay and either do fielding drills, catching or a bit of bowling. Joe was bowling well but got fed up with it and sat and watched Ben doing his karate, that left me looking at the clock thinking there's still half hour so I made use of the half hour and had a go at bowling leg breaks using one of those tennis balls with a rubber 1/2 and a furry 1/2. Swing balls I think they're called?
Anyway it went exceptionally well. Again it panned out that I can get it to turn if I make a massive effort not to bend the hand or do anything with my hand that feels like it's going to make it turn. As soon as I do anything that feels like it should produce a Leg Break it produces a Wrong Un. So the answer for me is to try and bowl straight so that when the hand comes over the palm of the hand is facing the batsman, the spin is then imparted by the 3rd finger trailing around the edge of the ball and staying there as long as possible. Again I have to say it feels totally wrong and slightly awkward but it works. Again as I've said recently it seems to be an incredibly acurate delivery highlighted by the fact that in the hall I bowl along a line marked down the centre of the court and I can generally pitch it within a 6" margin 60% of the time with 35% of the time it pitching down the offside and maybe 5% going slightly down the legside. Either way when it pitches 6 yards short of the stumps it goes wide of the stumps by around one and half to two feet. And, it has that increadibly good bounce and it's faster. Again the grip seemed to be absolutely integral to how it spins. The 3rd finger today seemed to work really well when the last 3rd of the finger (past the last knuckle) was definitely placed firmly on the ball and the ball placed fairly high in the hand up amongst the fingers rather than in the plam. The thumb was more or less redundant and played no part in the delivery at all.So this ended up being a brilliant little session further increasing my enthusiam to pursue the Leg Break further. So now I can't wait till Thursday to see if I can vary it's flight, speed and length and cause problems for the bowlers.
Came home slightly early today and came across our cricket field. It looks pretty knackered after the weekends football, but it's relatively flat. It's been mild the last few days with the temperature at night being well in excess of 4 degrees centigrade which is the temperature at which grass doesn't grow. So this weather should in time see the grass get going soon and start to recover.
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