I've been trying to get my son Joe to bat and face the new bowling, but as yet he's turned me down every time. So it looks like the proof will have to come in the game this weekend.
Tonight the first over or two were a bit scratchy, some wides, but once I got going it got better. Tomorrow I'm just going to practice hitting the stumps or hitting the target length consecutively and see how that goes. What I'll do is set a target of doing either 40 times in the session and see how long or how many balls it takes to do it.
Follow up
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On Saturday 25th we played against Great Waltham and I deployed the Flipper as my stock ball see the account here and it went well. So at the moment I'm enthused by the situation and I'm going to keep working with it looking to improve further.
Over this last week I've continued to practice every night bowling 150 + deliveries and I've started to mark out the wicket with markers so that I can monitor the consistency of line and length as well as calculate the percentage of wides. Interestingly, I read last week in the Guardian that Jofra Archer wanting to get into the England team realised that one solution might be to practice on his own and he cut his own strip somewhere across the road from his house, just as I have.
“He went away and trained incredibly hard, to the point where he rolled his own wicket in the yard across the road and put a net around it and did all his drills into that. He came back nine months later and he was a different-looking athlete – pretty much the bowler you see today with that speed and accuracy".
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/may/19/jofra-acher-england-bowling-cricket
Once back indoors the rough diagrams that I mark while I'm practicing I then digitize using Photoshop.
This is the result...
The measurements are imperial - No.s across the bottom are yards and the grids are 1' (12"x12"). The green rectangle at 4 yards is my target mat that I use which is 20" x 39". At the moment you can see that my bowling seems to vary without too much intervention from being really full to a good length.
The batsman in the last game said that he was unable to get me off the square and if it wasn't for trying to bowl two leg-breaks which went wrong and were hit for a 4 and a 2 my figures would have been decent. I'd like to think that it's the back-spin that makes the Flippers difficult to hit. I'm not tall, so they're going to come in from a low starting point and if the physics of the back-spinning ball holds up they're going to hold their line through the air despite the relatively slow speed (Bernoulli affect)? They then vary in the way they come off the surface dependent on what delivery I use!
So at the moment I'm quite pleased with how they're working.
I haven't bowled Flippers so consistently in a game since the days when I was bowling Googlies as my stock ball and then I used them as the variation to the Googly and this was one of the most effective periods of my bowling. So the plan is to carry on with the Flippers and hone them further and then start to introduce Leg-breaks off this faster approach to the crease. Initial experiments apart from the two in this game at Waltham show real promise.
28.5.19
Today 28.5.19 I've bowled two session both around about an hour with a 3 hour break in between. The 2nd session below was about 80 balls so I guess the one above was similar?
You might have noticed the weird cluster of balls on the leg-side right up on the bowling crease. If I could somehow get my radar right these would be bottom of the stump yorkers, so this is something I need to look into and rectify as mentioned earlier.
I've started to introduce more frequent Leg-Breaks and these seem to be working well with this run-up and as you can see in the middle pitch map, I'm landing them on the mat.
What I might do in the next day or so is cut the mat down in size so that it's 3' x 1.5' so that it fits into the grids more accurately and I can an even more accurate assessment of what I'm doing when practicing.
If you're looking to do this yourself I'll post a picture in the next few days of the set up showing how I manage to figure out the length and width.
Update September 13th 2019
After years of bowling primarily leg-breaks and Googlies and doing so with a lack of control much of the time, this summer has been a revelation. As the summer went on I bowled more and more Flippers and as I did so my economy went down and down and I got to bowl more and more overs. In the last game at the end of August, I played a friendly game for another team and got to bowl 10 overs back to back. I only bowled 3 leg-breaks, the first being a good-un and the two follow-up leg-breaks got tonked for 4 through the leg-side. Other than that I reckon I went for 2 an over on risky runs. The conclusion at the end of the game was that next season I'll bowl exclusively Flippers and work on combining the leg-breaks as a variation in practice. Then, and only then - when I can land the leg-breaks consistently on, or about the off-stump I bring the leg-breaks back and see how it works. (Providing I'm fit enough to play next season).
Follow up
_______________________________________________________
On Saturday 25th we played against Great Waltham and I deployed the Flipper as my stock ball see the account here and it went well. So at the moment I'm enthused by the situation and I'm going to keep working with it looking to improve further.
Over this last week I've continued to practice every night bowling 150 + deliveries and I've started to mark out the wicket with markers so that I can monitor the consistency of line and length as well as calculate the percentage of wides. Interestingly, I read last week in the Guardian that Jofra Archer wanting to get into the England team realised that one solution might be to practice on his own and he cut his own strip somewhere across the road from his house, just as I have.
“He went away and trained incredibly hard, to the point where he rolled his own wicket in the yard across the road and put a net around it and did all his drills into that. He came back nine months later and he was a different-looking athlete – pretty much the bowler you see today with that speed and accuracy".
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/may/19/jofra-acher-england-bowling-cricket
Once back indoors the rough diagrams that I mark while I'm practicing I then digitize using Photoshop.
This is the result...
 |
| Pitch map - SomeblokecalledDave practice with Flippers 27.5.19
The coloured balls represent the following -
Red - Are balls that go on to hit the stumps.
Blue - Are deliveries that are decent, these vary quite a bit, as the Flippers I bowl vary in a number of ways. 90% of them are cross-seam flippers, so they have the potential to break either left or right especially if its a diagonal seamed release. There's also the bounce variation potential - if the ball lands on the seam it can rear-up dramatically and if it lands on the smooth surface it does what a Flippers does - stays low. The back-spin that is imparted on the ball makes it act differently through the air and when it hits the surface it actually stalls noticeably. So even if the ball goes down when it hits the surface its anyone's guess where it'll deviate to.
Yellow - These are wides. You'll see from the pitch map below and to some extent the two above I have this proclivity to bowl yorkers right onto the bowling crease out-side of the leg-stump. Not so clever if it's right-hander, but might be useful against a left-hander? The only issue is, its not something I have control over at this point. That's something I'm working on at the moment.
Black - These are the Leg-Breaks (below) which at the moment I'm still bowling few and far between, but as this week goes on I'll introduce more of them. So far almost all of them turn much more than the Flippers that break to leg and in practice my control of them is pretty good.
|
The batsman in the last game said that he was unable to get me off the square and if it wasn't for trying to bowl two leg-breaks which went wrong and were hit for a 4 and a 2 my figures would have been decent. I'd like to think that it's the back-spin that makes the Flippers difficult to hit. I'm not tall, so they're going to come in from a low starting point and if the physics of the back-spinning ball holds up they're going to hold their line through the air despite the relatively slow speed (Bernoulli affect)? They then vary in the way they come off the surface dependent on what delivery I use!
So at the moment I'm quite pleased with how they're working.
28.5.19
You might have noticed the weird cluster of balls on the leg-side right up on the bowling crease. If I could somehow get my radar right these would be bottom of the stump yorkers, so this is something I need to look into and rectify as mentioned earlier.
I've started to introduce more frequent Leg-Breaks and these seem to be working well with this run-up and as you can see in the middle pitch map, I'm landing them on the mat.
What I might do in the next day or so is cut the mat down in size so that it's 3' x 1.5' so that it fits into the grids more accurately and I can an even more accurate assessment of what I'm doing when practicing.
If you're looking to do this yourself I'll post a picture in the next few days of the set up showing how I manage to figure out the length and width.
Update September 13th 2019
After years of bowling primarily leg-breaks and Googlies and doing so with a lack of control much of the time, this summer has been a revelation. As the summer went on I bowled more and more Flippers and as I did so my economy went down and down and I got to bowl more and more overs. In the last game at the end of August, I played a friendly game for another team and got to bowl 10 overs back to back. I only bowled 3 leg-breaks, the first being a good-un and the two follow-up leg-breaks got tonked for 4 through the leg-side. Other than that I reckon I went for 2 an over on risky runs. The conclusion at the end of the game was that next season I'll bowl exclusively Flippers and work on combining the leg-breaks as a variation in practice. Then, and only then - when I can land the leg-breaks consistently on, or about the off-stump I bring the leg-breaks back and see how it works. (Providing I'm fit enough to play next season).
