10 steps back

It's Wednesday and I've not even picked up a ball all day - not even to flick. The only thing I've done which is cricket related is to say that I'm not playing this Sunday at Chalkwell Park and I've mowed the wicket in the paddock. I dropped the blades even further and gave it a really short cut and then said to Ben and Joe that tomorrow night we'll have a bat on there. The only thing is all the local kids seem to have taken to playing football in there in the early evening whereas I'm pretty sure that last year they'd have been on the football pitch just across the way?

Last night I bowled and it was pretty shameful in that I couldn't do anything consistently apart from bowl very innocuous small turning leg breaks on the off-stump. The thing is - I thought that this was pretty much what I was doing last year and yet I was taking wickets galore and yet this year I've been taken to task so far. After last nights bowling where I was showing a tendency to bowl wrong uns when I made any effort to spin the ball big I've decided not to bowl tonight and see if that helps in some way?

When I get back to it I'll be trying to bowl the Biggun and I'll be setting up the other set of spring back stumps and putting them in front of the actual stumps in the position of the batsman and I'll be trying to bowl round the back of them from outside of leg.

Slowly but surely

I had another poor game on Sunday with no wickets but slightly better figures, but I'll blog about that later. With the fact that I'm bowling so badly it seems far more important that I get the Big Leg Break sussed. I spend varying amounts of time with it and have differing levels of success with it, but there's a few little things that are coming together.

1. The length, I'm gradually getting the length and during some sessions I can bowl it and get it to turn big off of 22 yards, but most of the time I'm working at 20 yards.

2. The accuracy isn't horrendous bad and if it doesn't turn it generally goes on to hit or just misss the stumps or slightly worryingly it'll be a wrong un instead that goes the other way almost as good as the leg break! The subtleties in the wrist position are exceedingly difficult for me to perceive still, which seems to bode well for the future if I can get this sussed, because it feels to me as though I'll only need to change the wrist position a smidge and the ball will do other things?

With my old style bowling I'm still being tonked everywhere because there just seems to be so little turn off the wicket whereas over the winter and even now using a Hockey Ball on concrete or tarmac I can get the ball to turn, so maybe because of the nature of the dimple plastic ball it does grip the surface and assist the spin? Maybe with my own bowling I'm landing the ball on the smooth area of the ball. What I have noticed about some of my own bowling is that it's not spinning through the air that much - but somehow it still turns okay. Maybe when I'm practicing I float it in a bit slower whereas when faced with a batsman I'm less inclined to float the ball in and I'm bowling a lot flatter?

Tonight I was bowling the Biggun and there were degrees of success, when it turned it did so massively and when it didn't it went straight or the other way. But again as with recent sessions the accuracy was pretty decent along with the length. So I'll continue to plug away slowly.

I reckon we must be in to week 4 of a very dry and sunny spell here in the UK and as you can see our practice wicket in the Paddock is drying up and big cracks are appearing just short of where I bowl. I gave it a mow this morning with a lowered blade. I've left the middle of the wicket for the moment but I may finish it off tomorrow. The bowlers end though is a bit of a mess - very uneven in comparison with the batting end and if it rains heavy over the summer I'll look to trying to improve it and level it out a bit more.

I've got an away match tomorrow and I'm not 100% sure where it is, so I wont actually know till I turn up at the pool and find out where the venue is. Lets hope I can be more effective than I was last week?

The Big Leg-Break

This is slowly coming together, I don't think it's something I can rush. I'm currently in a poor form stage with my bowling, but I had a couple of hours today, including half an hour in the Paddock bowling in my normal manner not trying to do anything special and that was pretty good. Then later I went over to another field and towards the end of the session I focussed on bowling the Big Leg-Break. I put a single stump in the ground and then another with a bag over the top of it a yard & a bit in front of the single stump blocking the view of the single stump. I then tried pitching the ball legside turning it round the back of the bag/stump - it went okay - it looked quite promising - with a set of three stumps I reckon I'd have hit them a few times. This was over about 18-20 yards I reckon.

Match Sunday, so hopefully I'll be able to do something a bit better this week?

Not as bad as I thought

Here it is the bowling figures from Sundays game. Having looked at them I feel an awful lot better about the whole situation now. They've got me on here as Johnson, so as you can see I went for 11, 15, 16, 5 and 10 - fifty seven off of 5 overs works out at 11.4 an over which is half as bad as I thought it was going to be. Just experiencing those 6's right from the 1st ball was obviously massively psychologically damaging, I'd come away feeling like Dan Von Brunger who got hit for 6 sixes by Herschelle Gibbs in the 2007 world cup. My team mate Wayne who's an off-spinner who varies his speed massively and gets good Off-spin only did slightly better than me with 9.5 and he's a far more experienced player than me, so that's some consolation as well.

All at sea

Had an hour out in the paddock tonight. Most of the time was spent trying to bowl the Big Leg-break. Worked intermittently over a short distance - 15 yards, but any more than that and I lost it completely quite quickly. I keep saying this, but I suppose I'll have to work at it at a short distance for some time before I move up to the next stage. Maybe I'll try 16 yards for a few days and see what happens and move up in increments of 2 yards at a time. Realistically I could come up with a 4 week plan, bowling a whole week at each length seeing if I can get it sussed at each of the lengths before moving on? Something needs to be done, because whatever the changes are that I've made with my usual bowling action, they seemed to have improved my accuracy, but not the amount of turn I get off the wicket. It's all a bit depressing at the minute, but I'll have to see how it goes over the coming week and maybe ask to bowl last so that I'm only subjected to the tail enders in my next match just as a precaution?

Back to the drawing board.

I don't have the exact score but a rough score will give you some idea what kind of a day I've had with my first game of the season......

Hornchurch 369 for 4 and in reply we were 54 all out. One of their openers scored 220! It was the worst bowling performance I've ever come up with in any game it was like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0Bl-Tud_U for all six overs. The final two did get better, but by then it was far too late. Now the excuses...... The bloke that scored 220 was a 1st team player No.3 batsman and it wasn't just me that he took apart, although I reckon I was the worst by far.

So, what now? I've not felt like I've been on form for the last week or so, so that may be a contributory factor. I've also been mucking about with the way I bowl, my action, the way I grip the ball, the rotation and more and over the last week all it's really done is messed my bowling up. Other people have said to try and lose the skip that I do when I bowl and basically I've been listening to loads of other people and trying loads of different stuff out. The main thing is - I've just not felt comfortable in my overall action.

Most of the stuff that I bowled today were full tosses and half-volley type balls, the pitch didn't offer any bounce, so I'd imagine that worked against me as normally the irregular bounce causes problems and a lot of the shots were playing the ball from the off-side hitting it out to deep mid-wicket or rather about 50' over the top of deep mid-wicket. I only bowled 2 wides and they were both down the off-side. The ball wasn't turning much either and the wrong uns which came out okay were being hit 50' over the top of deep square leg. None of it was good, 80% was just simply too long, loads of full tosses - just a total disaster.

Wrist Spin frustration

Managed to bowl a lot today 3 or 4 seperate sessions all of them kind of frustrating. It may be the nature of the wicket in the Paddock, but I'm not getting a great deal of turn off the wicket at all. In recent months with the practice on tarmac using Hockey balls I've been getting the ball to turn very well, but on grass with a seamed ball it seems a bit inconsistent. My accuracy is good, but the turn I get with my leg-break seems a bit minimal and I've not been that happy with it. Maybe I need to go back to hockey balls and just see if it works with them or whether I've changed something in my action that means I'm not spinning the ball which is what I suspect is what's happening because if I try and bowl my wrong un it turns beautifully.

What I have been doing is trying to work with my over-rotation and limit that as that's the likely cause of my feet/calf muscle problems and people are suggesting that if I don't over-rotate I might get more spin. But the evidence today has been that I get the ball to turn more off the wicket if I stick to my natural way of bowling with the over-rotation.

I've just had a look at the John F Cooke you tube video of Beau Casson bowling and noticed that maybe my follow through isn't that strong? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaXEw9-XjP4 Casson brings his arm through powerfully and then it tucks up - whereas my arm kind ends up dangling loose after a bit of a follow through. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ5fp3T5hkM The other thing in the Casson video is the use of cones to try and train you to not to rotate, funnily enough the main bloke David Freedman demonstrates a drill to increase power in the follow through and massively over-rotates.

The kids were away today at the beach with some friends and my wife leaving me at home to have a bit of practice. It ended up being a frustrating couple of hours with nothing going particularly right. Extremely accurate, but not a lot of turn with the leg-breaks. The wrong un on the other hand turns like Shane Warnes ball of the century nearly every time! After about an hour of persisting with the Leg-Break it eventually started to come good with a far more relaxed approach and a looser grip. So for the latter 3rd of the session I was back on form, but I was still trying all sorts of things and never really found a good groove where I felt I was bowling with a
degree of ease. At the end, for an extra 10 minutes or so, I had a go at the Biggun having been practicing it up against the garage and it working well. The same success was initially found over about 15 yards but I then quicky changed up to 17, 19 and 22 yards and it went to pieces again. I find that the more effort I put into bowling it the more it has a tendency to be a wrong un.


Later in the day I had another 1/2 an hour bowling just the Biggun over fifteen yards and that went fairly well. This delivery in comparison with my other Leg-Breaks is fundamentally different. To the point where maybe my usual Leg-Breaks may not even be Leg-Breaks, but might be defined as Leg-Cutters because they do not use Philpotts much vaunted 'Flick'? Maybe it's the case that because I've had the 'Googly syndrome' I'm still really struggling to produce what Philpott would call a proper Leg-Break with the big wrist flick, I can do it with the Wrong Un easily and it turns massive and with such ease, but getting the wrist and fingers to flick so the ball comes out as a Big Leg-Break I'm finding very difficult. Having said that it's coming together slowly. This second session I just stuck to bowling over 15 yards and for about 66% of the time I'd say that it worked well and it turned massively. The rest of the time it went straight or come out as Wrong Uns. I'll stick to 15 yards and just see if I can get it working well over that distance far more consistently before I mover on to bowling a longer
distance?

Wrist Spin Bowling: Day 13 of 18

Wrist Spin Bowling: Day 13 of 18

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