Peter Philpotts Going around the loop - Wrist-spin bowling

Peter Philpotts 'Going around the loop'


In his book ‘The Art of Wrist Spin bowling’ the Aussie wrist-spinner Peter Philpott describes how the ball can be bowled with the seam rotating (Spinning) in pretty much any direction through the use of the Wrist position – hence Wrist-Spin bowling.

If you hold your hand out in front of you with your palm facing up, place a ball in it using the Wrist-spinners grip as below (Double click on the image) ...

 

With the hand and arm extended in front of you, now rotate both your arm and wrist and you’ll see that you’re able to turn your wrist with the ball in your hand ‘Round the clock’ 360 degrees to present the ball once again on top facing you. The initial position is pretty much the release for the leg-break delivery and the final position is the release position for the Googly (Wrong Un). All the intermediate stages give you the other variations - Top-Spinner, Big Leg Break and Orthodox back-spinner.

This bloke here in the video demonstrates it particularly well.. double click on the image for the videos. This one from the side...

 This video below from the front (Double click on the image).

And here below is Shane Warne's mentor Terry Jenner going around the loop.

 Jenner at the end of this then shows you the basic Flipper, which also can be bowled in numerous variations using the exact same principle of adjusting the wrist position.

 

The Yips - spin bowling

The Yips                                                           10 views 9/4/18

Miriam Webster dictionary defines the Yips as...

Definition of yips

: a state of nervous tension affecting an athlete (such as a golfer) in the performance of a crucial action

• had a bad case of the yips on short putts

If you ever watch wrist-spinners - even Shane Warne, you'll see them occasionally get it wrong, the less experienced they are, the more frequently you'll see it, especially if they're under pressure for their place in the team. In club cricket it's the same.

Universally, there seems to be a perception that if you're a wrist-spinner you're going to be expensive, you're going to drag the ball down, you're going to get your line wrong and you're going to go for 4's and 6's. Unfortunately this ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, no-one else in the team believes in your ability and it reduces your confidence. You end up being nervous before your spell, you want to bowl, but your aware that you're going to be thrown the ball soon and your anxiety levels grow. You become so concerned that you start to focus on the fear rather than analysing the batsman and his strengths and weaknesses. You end up being thrown the ball, you've got no plan other than wanting to land the ball on the cut strip. You approach the crease and you're thinking 'Do I run in, do I walk in - what's going to work'? You're asked...

"What field do you want Dave"? You mumble back something to the affect of...
"I don't know.... just a standard field" You reply, momentarily you buy a few seconds as you move people around. Your mouth is so dry it feels like bottom of a Budgie cage, your arm pits are sweating and your hands are clammy. You stand at the top of your crease and forget all the advice from Stuart MacGill and hold on to the ball like there's no tomorrow. You don't dare throw it from hand to hand like you would do normally, you just know you're going to drop it and then probably as you try and pick it up, you'll do something dumb like fall over and face plant just for good measure! Instead, you stand there squeezing the ball so tight the seams are starting to unravel, everybody is watching you - your whole team, the batsmen - even the umpire and the bloke on strike are looking over your shoulders at you. Normally there's no crowd, but you glance towards the pavilion and somehow, the whole world and his brother seem to have turned up, in the surrounding playing fields kids have stopped playing football, girls have stopped gawping at their phones, everyone is now looking at you...

You start your approach to the crease, you stutter and you know right from that point this is going to be tragic, you bound - screaming at yourself in your head... "Get side on! Get side on! Get side on"! You land over the popping crease, your arm comes over and you try and release the ball. The umpire is just about to call no-ball for the foot over the line as he watches the ball come out of your hand and loop up into the sky, with more up and than length. He as well as you and the other 80,000 people watching, hold their breath to watch the ball stop going up and to start dropping. Within a moment everyone knows that the ball is going to come down and land with a thud somewhere between Silly Mid-on and Mid-Wicket.

"No ball" he calls, his call cuts through the deathly silence, you hear the scorers pen make its mark in the score book.

"Whoops" you say, trying to make a joke of it. "Sorry lads" you follow up with.

"Come on Dave - line and length - keep it simple".

You try again and again it's equally tragic - again you don't get it on the cut strip. The 3rd attempt it might have landed on the cut strip as you tried to bowl it slower and it was on target in that it was heading for the batsman... right in his slot and he smacks it for 6 over mid-off.

 

Searching for the ball buys you a couple of minutes and your captain comes over and offers some advice and words of wisdom, you come back with...

"Lee, last night I was practicing... I'm landing it on a mat 12"x12" one in every 4 balls and turning it massively, I've got the Yips".

 

Scott Boswell (cricket)

 

It took Leicestershire paceman Scott Boswell 10 years to get over one over. In a 2001 final, he lost the plot and bowled eight wides in that over and was cut by the county soon after. The Guardian sought him out years later.

"I just couldn't let go of the ball. I wanted to get on with it, so I began to rush. The more I panicked, the more I rushed."

 

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=11579304

 

Scott Boswell Youtube.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/sep/18/scott-boswell-and-the-yips

 

https://www.scotsman.com/sport/cricket/bowling-yips-threatens-hamilton-s-career-1-611818

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yips

Google Books - Use CTRL + F and search the entry on Yips

http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/310737.html

 

 Apparently left-arm orthodox spinners suffer from the Yips more than wrist-spinners it seems, I've gone through it a couple of times, the last one was in the 2015 season. Reading the espncricinfo article above made sense to me because for me 2015 was an injury prone season where I was re-modelling my bowling action. These are common features associated with the Yips.

The thing that helped me was I scrapped trying to do the new thing with the bowling action and returned to my usual bowling action. The other thing was the support from the whole team, they let me bowl, knowing full well I was going to go for a few runs and or totally get it wrong as per the description above and yet not visually or verbally show any sense of anything other than support. But the clincher was the captain suggesting that I open the bowling. Usually I'm brought on when there's a couple of really set - good batsman, that the pace bowlers haven't been able to see off. This is usually around about the 20-23rd over in a 50 over game. But against an opener who's looking to stay in and do their job I had far more of an easier time and knew this was likely to be the case. The other thing was I didn't have the time in the field to worry about whether I'd be able to bowl or not, it was straight in - no time to think - just bowl and it worked. The other thing that was suggested was that if it did go wrong I'd only be bowled for the one over with the option of coming on again later. I think I bowled three overs and went for about 5 runs an over with no wides or no-balls. The following week I was fine again and okay for the rest of the season.

Reflective practice

Update 26/1/19 287

In some professional fields of work practice - teaching and nursing are two that come to mind, there's a necessity to reflect on what you do in order to adopt new strategies and approaches to your work, in order to keep on top of what you're doing and maintain professional standards.

If you're old enough you may remember 2013 and the Australia teams "Homeworkgate" incident after a lost series in India...

After Australia's humiliating defeat to India in the second test at Hyderabad - where they became the first side in test history to declare in the first innings but then lose by an innings - players were asked to identify three areas of possible improvement.

To me, this sounds as though they were asked to reflect on what they'd done in a more formal manner rather than simply chat about it and sleep on it, which to me coming from a educational background seems like a reasonable request. At the same time I can see why in a sports scenario such as the Australian cricket team this might not have gone down that well.

That aside, I reckon there's a place for it in cricket in both the informal manner and the more formal written way which I'm going to explain. It's evident that some cricket players do it in their own personal way as a part of their development and practice and I write about this in one of the other posts  - see here

Needless to say a lot of people will think this is total nonsense and an utter waste of time, but others might see it differently and see some merit in it. So, what does it involve?

Gibbs Reflective model

In Peter Philpotts book The Art of Wrist Spin bowling one of the things that he tries to get across to the reader is the need to take all aspects of your training, practice and development seriously. Grimmett too, wasn't one to take practice lightly and practiced pretty much in isolation, never bowling in nets to a batsman because he wanted no-one to know his tricks. If you take your bowling seriously an extension of the committed practice might also include reflecting on what you do in the form of a written response?

So, it works like this... You have a practice and you get nowhere. But, rather than get on the XBOX and start playing PUBG or spend the next 5 hours looking at memes on your phone you use this illustration of the Gibbs reflective cycle to reflect on what went wrong and devise a plan to for the next session.

(1). Description (What happened)? You clarify what it was that you went out to practice on. Again, referencing Philpott, there is no point on going out without an aim or an objective, so this first question gets you to look at whether that was the case. What happened did you really go out there with a clear intent and did you stick to it? Briefly you write down what you did - a paragraph or two.

(2). Feelings (What were you thinking and feeling)?  Again, this requires a brutally honest appraisal of your emotional response. Were you up for it? Was your state of mind correct, or did you practice with your head somewhere else or did you go and practice to take your mind off of something else. Again a brief written response of a paragraph or two.

(3). Evaluation (What was good and bad about the experience)? This is fairly self-explanatory and again should be kept to a few paragraphs, I try not to dwell too much on the negatives and look for the positives and try and use an approach where I use two positives where possible and one negative aspect. This usually relates to what you actually did - the physical aspects of the practice.

(4). Analysis (What sense can you make of the situation)? This is the important bit and when I teach this, I tell students this is the bit that should contain the most detail. In order for it to be analytical there needs to be a questioning aspect to the process - ask the question what if and explore what the outcome would be if something was done differently - why might it make a difference.

(5). Conclusion (What else could you have done)? You might find that you draw conclusions in the analysis section, so pick out the main conclusion and reiterate it or skip this section and go straight to the action plan.

(6). Action Plan (if it arose again what would you do)? Well, it is going to arise again, because you're going to have play or practice again in the future. So, plan what you're going to do, how will you implement a plan or strategy? What are you going to do next time you practice that is going to enable some form of improvement, what are you looking to improve - how are you going to do it and when?

As I said it wont suit everyone, but some people will find that by writing stuff down and being brutally honest with yourself like this in black and white does actually help.

Here's some examples from my old blog...

http://mpafirsteleven.blogspot.com/2013/05/reflective-practice-spin-bowling.html
http://mpafirsteleven.blogspot.com/2015/05/leg-spin-bowling-practice-gibbs.html
http://mpafirsteleven.blogspot.com/2013/04/homework-gibbs-reflective-practice.html
http://mpafirsteleven.blogspot.com/2014/05/gibbs-reflective-practice-used-in.html

If you're not convinced and need more evidence of it's potential see here https://www.businessballs.com/self-awareness/reflective-practice/