Last year I opened the bowling and the sharp seam cut my ring finger till it bled. I kept on bowling without use of plasters and even though the pain was quite excruciating I could still bowl. Eventually the skin on my finger hardened and is now heavily callused. That rough skin allows me to grip the ball much more firmly, so I can still bowl with a new ball without it slipping because of the roughness of the skin. My grip is orthodox, but not entirely the same as most people's grips. The last knuckle of my ring finger doesn't touch the seam so it's contact with it is delayed (more revs) and my index and middle fingers point in the opposite direction of the usual grip. (Or are more or less straight) My wrist can bend a lot and has lots of "spring" power. When I started out I had a straight-ish wrist but now it's much more cocked and the more wrist I use the more revs I seem to get. The grip you demonstrate in your blog is slightly different, it seems more rigid and stiff, almost military like. I have tried it for myself and I get more revs with it when I spin the ball from hand to hand, but much less when I bowl with it.
The only thing that makes me spin the ball so hard is the fact that I try to spin it hard, and the above mentioned attributes that I have. At least once a week I have "revs practice" , where I start out by putting 100% effort in, and say that was 750 revs. Even if the next ball has twice as much spin on it, it was only 800 revs. I keep psyching myself up until I really feel that I'm putting at least 2700 revs on the ball, but no, defective Trackman, only 1000 revs. Getting angry and pumping myself up like that helps me get more spin on the ball.
One other thing I do sometimes is draw a line in the nets about 1 meter to the right of the stumps. From very early I start the ball on that line, wanting to drift it onto the stumps, and for the whole day I try to do it until I'm finally satisfied and believe I have done it.
Spin always comes first for me, I want to spin the ball more than Warne and I want it more than anything else! I want to turn the pitch into brimstone with fierce revs, and I want to scorch the cover off the ball. I'd rather bowl a hip high full toss and know I put everything on it than a good length ball with anything less on it than my absolute most. I adopted this mentality this season and hopefully by next year I'll be spinning the ball so much that I can start to work on other things as well.
This isn't really what it takes to get drift, anyone can get good drift if they just try to spin the ball a lot, but I'm not satisfied with a little bit. I want a pitches length of drift and even more turn, but I'm a bit crazy when it comes to wrist spin
13 year old Jacques Voigt from the Eastern Cape area.
