Flipper - off-spinning variation

 The last two seasons I've been playing at a much higher level than I ought to be playing in my opinion and I've had to adapt to the situation and change my bowling. So I've been bowling flippers coming in off a much longer run-up than I have ever done and it's worked for the most part. Only once have I been aware that anyone's sussed out what I've been doing and that was young bloke from one of the Southend teams who I heard say to his Dad 'He's bowling back-spinners' and he was taking me and everyone else to the cleaners.

I've kept it really simple, mostly I'm bowling cross-seamed with the occasional up-right seamed delivery. I vary the speeds and how much spin I put on the ball and rarely I try the one out of the front of the hand with a bit of off-spin, but I've found that rarely turns and if it does it's minimal. Recently at home I was thinking about the potential of the off-spinning variation and realised that it would probably work so much better with a lower arm angle. I bowl with a very upright arm and getting the wrist into an appropriate position to release a flipper with off-spin is tricky, but my initial experiments indoors seem to indicate that simply by lowering my arm may yield benefits. Another observation is that it still retains the back-spin aspect, so it does actually work it'll be an off-break with back-spin which is an unusual delivery. 

End of season 2019

It's the end of the season and its been pretty miserable for me as I seem to be reaching the age where my body is not up to it. The worst thing is it seems to have happened when I have had a epiphany moment with the use of Flippers.

The start of the season was marred by issues with my hips and core strength which I put down to the fact that I'd done some building work on my house and nearly killed myself physically. As a result I thought I'd completely rest over the winter in order to recuperate.

By January I was still feeling the affects of the building work and added to that I'd lost all my usual fitness. So I started to work on my fitness and flexibility. That's the point where it transpired that my hips and butt were weak and everything below that point was out of sync. So a lot of work was done trying to get all that sorted. Meanwhile I had the opportunity to net a lot over Jan and February and I bowled my usual Leg-Breaks exceptionally well and looked to be starting the season on a high.

First game went okay with 2 wickets in a pre-season friendly, but thereafter it went down-hill very quickly and my new captain started to leave me out of the attack. Being a bowler I was now turning up basically just to field. The club had changed leagues and we'd lost our fourth XI where I normally resided and basically had moved up a level and I was being left behind. I concluded I needed to join a bigger club with a 4th,5th or 6th XI that played at my level. I started to look around and found a club and my intentions became clear to my own club and they rang me and virtually pleaded with me to stay.

Meanwhile, having been carted around the park by these blokes here I'd already started to explore how I might address the fact that my bowling was so ineffective. It had  been noted in the first game of the season that I'd have done so much better than my 2 wickets if I had a straight ball. So I started to look at my use of the Flipper combined with my leg-breaks. Practicing with my son Joe he said one of the biggest issues was the lack of pace with my leg-breaks. So I started to adopt a run up of about 9-10 steps. The Flippers immediately looked promising with consistency of line and length being markedly better than the Leg-Breaks, so I committed to working almost exclusively with the Flippers as it seemed to be very obvious that I could bowl these with good accuracy.

The red dots went on to hit the stumps

I then bowled the Flippers in a game and was kept on to bowl all 9 overs and went for very few runs. The runs that I did go for were down to attempting to bowl leg-breaks off the new run-up and was easily hit for 4 each time. At one point towards the end of my spell, the bloke that had been freely scoring before my spell ran a single and ended up at my end and commented... "Mate what are you bowling.... I can't get you off the square"! So that then provided the incentive to continue with the Flipper experiment.

But, the run-up was taking its toll on my body particularly my hips it seemed. I then had what seemed like a really innocuous minor accident walking along a dark corridor in my sons flat at Uni. I didn't realise that his dark corridor had a drop down to a new level equivalent of 1 stair step. I stepped down it and jarred my knee with a sensation of a strain in the back of my knee. It hurt slightly, but I didn't think much of it.

I then bowled in a couple more games and the Flippers went well again and I got carted when I tried the Leg-breaks. But I was noticing that I was struggling with my legs - seemingly with regards strength. I then started training with Sumo squats on a wobble (balance board) but going right down to an Asian squat and then one session I sensed a strain in the back of my knee and some subsequent swelling and soreness. This seemed more significant and happened just before my holiday in Cornwall, so I committed to taking things easy whilst away and stuck to it.

Once back in Essex and looking forward to a game of cricket I discovered that this week there was no game because of the uneven numbers in our league and everyone in the league at some point missed a game and it was our turn. So I contacted Orsett and Thurrock who I nearly defected to earlier in the year and got a Friendly game on Sunday.

I bowled superbly - probably the - if not the most controlled and consistent spell I've ever bowled. I got one wicket, that of a significant batsman and bowled my full allocation of 10 overs. Again the only time I was hit was the 2-3 times I bowled leg-breaks and both times I was hit for 4. Again the batsmen came up to me at the end of the game and asked "What the hell was you bowling"?

I realised that I was onto something here, as if it wasn't for the leg-breaks I'd have gone for about 2 an over and realised that in the short term I needed to cut the leg-breaks out totally and work on them in practice. But, that was never to happen.

By the time I'd packed my bag and got in the car my knees were feeling as though they were now suffering from the pounding of the run-up. I'd extended the run up in this game as it seemed a lot more rhythmic, previous games I'd been suffering from stuttering in the run-up, but extending it to about 14-15 steps had resolved that and added more pace. But having driven for about 10 minutes I got home and basically staggered to the front door with my right knee really suffering.

I iced it as best I could and then got it up above my head (Elevation). The next morning it wasn't any better and over the next 4 or 5 days I was in bad way and had even been to the Doctors. The doctors were fairly inconclusive. Xrays indicated that it wasn't arthritis and the doctor recommended I see a specialist and have a MRI scan. This was way back in mid August and I'm still waiting for the MRI scan appointment to come through.

In the meantime I've been taking it easy - no cricket, no running, no bowling and its been slowly improving. I get twinges in the back of the knee and it feels 'Delicate' generally. But I've been doing physio - strengthening the muscles above and around the knee and today I went over the paddock and bowled 7 balls off of a 9 step run-up with a decent bound. I bowled 100 or so balls off of a 2-3 step walk-in as well and I seem to have come away from that un-scathed. The plan is to carry on with the physio and to cycle through the winter and resume light bowling at winter nets. I'm hoping that come May I'll be able to run-in off of a 12-14 step run-up and bowl my Flipper variations and get some wickets.

The Flipper as your stock Ball

Originally drafted May 15th 2019

If you’ve read the post about the game with Rainham, you’ll see that I wasn’t happy with my bowling and the fact that I primarily have to rely on people taking catches... I was dropped 3 times. Any of the 3 if they'd been snaffled would have won us the game with the final wicket required. At the end of the analysis of the game I concluded that this week I’d focus on bowling exclusively Flippers.

Years ago, I spent 2 or 3 seasons bowling loads of flippers coupled with Googlies as I had Googly syndrome and couldn’t get the ball to break to off. As a part of re-learning the Leg-Break I had to scrap bowling Flippers and lost them. Since then and more recently, I’ve started bowling them in practice, but have rarely brought them to the game scenario. After the Rainham game and on reflection I made the decision to only bowl Flippers this week with the idea that, if I got it right and it looked like it might be a delivery I could execute with more consistency, I might bowl them in the next game?

I started on Saturday as soon as I got home from the game because I wanted to look at whether my poor bowling was a fitness and stamina issue, it wasn’t. I got through 240 balls that evening and went back to the 20’ run-up and bowled with far more pace.

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I did the same thing 200 - balls at least each session. Thinking about why I bowl so badly in the game scenario compared to the practice, I made the following observations. In practice you generally bowl ball after ball – up to 200 and you get a general sense of consistency over the 200 deliveries. What if you focus on the first 6 deliveries in isolation as in a game? In a game it matters – those 1^st six deliveries are judged by you, your captain, your team and the batsman and if you get it wrong it’s a long psychological haul back that you might not make or you may not get the chance to pull back because you could be taken out of the attack.

So, in the practice situation I started focusing on the first 6 balls and the subsequent 36 or 42 that followed as in a spell. I then thought that there may be an argument to replicate the game scenario further still and by tonight I was doing the following...

(1). Before I even started, I did some vigorous exercise to replicate the faster heart rate that I get as a result of being nervous about bowling the first delivery. I then bowled in that ‘Excited’ condition.

(2). I then did further exercise – throwing a ball and catching it, in doing so, delaying the time between each delivery, trying to replicate the delay between each delivery you see in a game scenario. Thus, not bowling one ball after another developing a rhythm as I do in a usual practice situation.

(3). Once the ‘Over’ was bowled, I then did fielding drills for several minutes -run and pick up a static ball and throw down the stumps for the amount of time that would constitute the other blokes over from the other end and then repeat form stage (1).

I did this for 6 or 7 overs before going back to general practice where I bowl one ball after another. Overall it went well, and it has been going really well as a rule. Coming off a 7-metre run-up, my movement through the crease is far more dynamic and my bowling is considerably faster than my usual 2-3 steps to the crease.

There have been leg-side balls that would need a bloke at fine leg and some might evade the keeper and go for byes, so I was thinking about what I might do to reduce the frequency of those as it was about 1 in every 6 balls which could easily spoil a decent over. I then recalled some advice from Stuart MacGill about bringing your leg through towards the batsman up and over your front foot – Not around your front foot. As soon as I implemented this, there was a marked improvement in both accuracy and speed, so tonight was a good session.

The only other aspect that I’ve not explored is whether there’s any impact with regards what I wear on my feet. When I practice, I wear trainers, so there’s difference in the grip compared to cricket shoes with their studs. There’s an analogy that says you can’t fire a canon-ball off a rowing boat as there’s an obvious stability issue. Theoretically with cricket shoes and their studs when I bowl there’s a potential difference in the torque that is generated compared to when I bowl in Adidas Sambas. Might it be that my bowling is honed to work effectively wearing trainers, but then once I don the cricket shoes, the additional grip suddenly increases the torque so creates all the issues?

So, this might be the next step in trying to ascertain what the issues are. Can I bowl as well wearing cricket shoes or is this a part of the problem?

That aside though, the way it’s going at the moment I’m looking at bowling Flippers primarily in the next game off this 7-metre run-up. With the Flippers there’s sub-variation – the ball I’ve been bowling the most is either a cross-seamed or scrambled seam ball. That’s mixed with the off-spinning version which does come in like an off-cutter. I then also have bastardised version of Grimmett’s Wrong-Wrong Un which just seems to do what it wants it goes either way. But all of them bring LBW into the game and more pace and… I can bring in the occasional Leg-Break with this extra speed as a variation and so far it’s looked useful.

More practice in the paddock

Off the back of the 2nd XI game and the fact that I beat the batsman with my solitary Flipper, I've been further enthused. The bloke I bowled at and beat said last year he'd been playing both 1st and 2nd XI league cricket and he came in at No.5, so I'm assuming he's half decent. I've bowled in the nets at one of our best batsman Liam Rouse and he said my Flipper nearly got him and that I should bowl it more and finally last year against Thundersley I bowled against another bloke and nearly had him with the Flipper too.

So after years of not using it, I'm now very enthusiastic about it and working with it constantly. Currently in practice I bowl alternate balls... Leg Breaks and Flippers. The issue use to be that I always felt that the Flipper would work best if suddenly used out of nowhere and that always meant that it was pretty much a high risk ball in that it would probably be wayward and sure enough it was. I'm now looking at my use of leg-breaks in isolation and thinking that I need a variation. I can't and don't want to bowl Wrong-uns because of previously mentioned outcomes related to that. I've tried to bowl finger spin with a minimal amount of success and that looks as though it'll take absolutely weeks to develop. My Top-Spinner is a bit sketchy - too loopy and comes out as a small leg-break,but the Flipper I currently feel has some potential.

The plan is to roll it out in the next game this coming weekend and see how it works. How to use it is the next issue, do I try and bowl it alternately and see if that causes any problems or mix it in sporadically, or lure the batsman into thinking there's a pattern to the bowling and then change it up?

I'll try and get some video footage of me bowling it and post it up.