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.