Swing Bowling

[Dipper]

Interesting what you say about McGrath, I remember him bowling once against England in England and it was one of those English days when the ball was going like a mofo, the other Aussie bowlers had been swinging it a lot and McGrath came back on and was trying to swing it and was just getting it wrong, the commentators were having a bit of a laugh and even his teammates were and the slow mo of the ball showed the seam going all over the place and he just went back to bowling his seamers, hitting the seam back of a length and getting that bit of a nip off the pitch that was his trademark.

 

[Dipper]

When it comes to swing bowling I'm a big believer in bowlers using the crease and making slight adjustments to the angle of the delivery as well as the length, not that this helps them swing the ball but if they are swinging it then its important.

Being here in England you see the ball swing a lot and you see a lot of swing bowlers who are very good technically but tactcially a lot of them are awful.

One that springs to mind was Andy Caddick, when they first brought in that zoomed in square box on TV that showed the ball in slow motion in its flight and you got to see the seam position of the ball as it went through the air Andy Caddick was the most perfect that I've ever seen in the way that there was often zero wobble on the seam, he was pulling it back perfectly along itself and as a result he got good away swing but my god all he did was deliver the ball from the same point on the crease ball after ball, usually bowling the same length, which was perhaps slightly shorter than perfect (but he was taller than most swing bowlers) and the result was often that if he didn't get a bloke out early (he would often beat the outside edge) then if they were reasonable players of swing and didn't go hard at the ball, played with soft hand and late they would get a feel for him and play a bit inside the line of the ball and often it would seem like he was beating the outside edge a lot (and yeah would he be standing there with his hands on his hip thinking how unlucky he was) but the reality was that the batsmen were playing him well and getting used to his angle of attack.

Compare this with Anderson who uses the crease a lot more, puts in the odd inswinger to keep them honest and is willing to bowl different lengths, especially being willing to push the length more and more forward. An Anderson speciality is to clean batsmen with fulled pitched outswingers that beat the outside edge and take out off stump, I've never seen a bowler do this more than him, he sets the ball right out to leg stump and its so full and swings late that it gives him the double chance of the edge or if it beats them then as I said off stump is knocked over.

He also does the weird thing, that I'm not sure is always a good, but it shows that he thinks in an unorthodox way, even when he has his away swinger to the right handers going perfectly often when a leftie comes in rather than keep bowling that ball for the LBW or bowled he starts bowling outswingers to them (inswingers to the right hander), he beats them a lot but from over the wicket its probably not the percentage ball to get the wicket as he tends to beat them too much to get the edge but its still interesting watching him go about it & he is willing to go round the wicket and bowl outswingers to the lefthanders which is well worth doing IMO and not something you saw from the likes of Caddick.

I'm definitely a big fan of sending in the odd inswinger to the righthanders, I reckon its almost like a spinner have the wrong un/ doosra, it just puts that doubt in the batsmens mind even if the ball itself isn't a big wicket taker in its own right.


I saw Sean Pollock getting some outswing once in England but he was still bowling from very close to the stumps as he does when he's just trying to hit the seam, Fannie de Villiers was commentating, who was a pretty decent swing bowler, and he was going off saying how Pollock didn't understand how to bowl swing and how with the ball swinging as much as it was he needed to get wider on the crease and angle the ball in so that the batsmen would be much more likely to get the edge, because bowling every ball from close to the stumps was just beating the outside edge and I've always thought that with away swing there's an art to beating the outside edge and there's an art to getting people out and they're not the same thing.