Had a bowl - Top-Spinner

What with the rain having stopped now for more than 4 days, and the weather being mild, Joe and I went out and had a bowl and a bat in the street using Readers Wind Balls.

Last year I was hoping to get my Top-Spinner going and struggled with it all season opting to bowl it with a fingery action rather than my basic Leg-Spinner action. The only thing useful about it last season was that quite often it came out as a wrong-un rather than a top-spinner, but my accuracy with it was useless. Towards the end of the season my bowling was pretty good on occasions and in one match I bowled so well I was able to bowl with varying degrees of side spin with less and more amounts of spin and it was probably one of my better bowling spells with loads of opportunities put down and got to bowl 8 or more overs, which is unheard of!

So keeping that in mind, I had a go at bowling a Top-Spinner with the conventional grip and it went quite well – accurate, fast-ish with Joe saying that it did dip sometimes quite well, but mixed in with the stock ball leg-breaks it looks promising and it’s something I’ll work on I reckon. It still had a little bit of “Leg” about it some of the time, but probably 60% of the time it was dead straight on the middle stump, when Joe was looking to play a spinning ball and most of the time he’d have been out stumped (Possibly due to the late dip)?

With the possibility of a small wrong-un being there with a slightly more twisted wrist I did give that a go, but to no avail. I’m not that interested in the wrong-un at the moment and I’m happy to have the option of the Top-Spinner if I can convert the same performance today into bowling with a real cricket ball. Hopefully I’ll go into the season with a variable Leg Break, a top spinner and a Flipper?

One thing I did notice was that my run up was lacking getting side on, so I need to work with that as well running up to the new season.