Cricket commentators are often heard chastising batsmen for playing against the spin. This is always seen as dangerous and inadvisable: the right-handed batsman, for example, is encouraged to play the ball turning in from off onto the leg-side. Hitting such a delivery back to off is to court danger. And pity the unfortunate batsman who gets out flouting this precept.
To play against the spin is to violate cricketing orthodoxy. Commentators and analysts often look askance at batsmen playing an off-break to cover and coaches are often seen berating players for playing in such a manner. Pitchvision.com is a highly regarded website, offering useful tips on cricket, and it features elite players giving instructions on technique. It dispensed this bit of counsel:
If the ball is turning in (off spin to a right handed batsman); the best areas to score are between mid off and midwicket. If you keep an open body position with your hips towards the target area the swing of the bat can be straight. It’s safe because you are accounting for the ball turning back into you (playing with the spin)…Driving wide on the offside is more dangerous because you are playing against the spin.
It then goes on to say that the best scoring areas for deliveries turning from leg is between straight down the ground and cover.
Nothing out of the ordinary there. In fact, most cricket aficionados would agree. But if you really think about it, playing with the turn might just be more dangerous than playing against it. Consider this: to play the off-spinner to the leg side, in the direction that the ball is spinning is to play across the line. Hitting him back onto the offside, however, is to meet the ball with more of the face of the bat, and thus a safer way to play. In presenting the full face to the ball the batsman gives himself the greatest chance of finding the middle of the bat.
Brian Lara scored 688 runs at an average of 114.66 in a three-test series against Sri Lanka and Muttiah Muralitharan in 2001/2002. After the tour he recalled some advice he received from Sir Garfield Sobers. The great man suggested to Lara that he should play the offspinner “back to where he was coming from.” In other words, Sobers told him to play against the spin.
In his book Behind The Shades, Duncan Fletcher, current Indian cricket coach but then with England, tells of an incident, also in Sri Lanka, where Graham Thorpe was trying to decode Muralitharan. With Thorpe being a left-hander, Murali’s stock delivery would have been turning into him from leg.
Thorpe’s initial theory, based on previous advice, was that he needed to close himself off in his stance and look to hit the ball through the off side, even though, as we said, Muralitharan was pitching the ball on or outside the leg stump. I told him to think about how he could hit the ball back where it spins from, hitting a straight ball with a straight bat. The answer was to open up his stance and hit the ball to the leg side with a straight bat. That might seem like hitting against the spin to the old-timers, but the laws of geometry will back me up to prove that he was, in fact, playing a straight ball. (p. 129)
The advice Fletcher gave Thorpe is therefore similar to that which Sobers offered to Lara. And if their success against the Sri Lankan master is anything to go by, the advice seemed to have been very helpful. What this means is that batsmen, over the years, might not have been well served by this long accepted method of negotiating spin bowling that has been passed down for generations. Perhaps, therefore, coaches should no longer frown when they observe batsmen playing against the spin.
Read more:
http://www.sportskeeda.com/2012/09/11/why-it-is-better-to-play-against-the-spin/#ixzz2C79OGCFV Follow us: @SportsKeeda on Twitter | SportsKeeda on Facebook
Author
Topic: Starting your innings against spinners (Read 17886 times)