In any cricket team, whether is be a junior, county or international one, variation is paramount to keeping the mystery around a side and to making sure you are less predictable when either batting or bowling. Batting is quite hard to vary as you usually have to play what you are given so therefore the bowling can, in a way, dictate what you as a batsman can do. Obviously batsmen can go out to the middle with a certain plan or attitude, which may differ from one another. For example, Joe Root will come out looking to be positive from the word go, whereas Alastair Cook might not be bothered with his strike rate and just look to poke and prod singles and wait for the bad ball to come.
Bowlers have a lot more variety to choose from when choosing what ball to deliver. They can come around or over the wicket. Seamers can choose to bang the ball in short, pitch it up on a good length or go to a yorker. Even spinners have the choice to spin the ball either way, throw it straight on, or bowl a ‘special’ delivery such as a googly or flipper.
Variation doesn’t just come in the type of delivery that is bowled; sometimes more natural things such as what hand you bowl with can make a lot of difference too. Any cricketer will tell you that the game is all about angles, and trying to find the right angles to be effective. A left-arm bowler will have a different release point to a right-hander and therefore this can cause new chinks in a batsman’s technique.
Australia have shown in recent times what the power of having a good left-arm bowler can do for a side, although Australia do boast three in the form of; Johnson, Starc and Faulkner. Arguably the best of the three, Johnson, has become so effective due to his pace and bounce, but combined with the angle of a coming over the wicket it cramped batsmen up and didn’t give them much room to free their arms up and play a pull or hook.
A step on from that, in England, David Willey is fast becoming England’s new hottest thing and apart from a handful of others he’s one of the only left-armers to have made an impact in the new England set-up. Willey is very different to Johnson, most notably he’s about 10mph slower and therefore doesn’t trouble batsman with the short ball, and secondly he’s yet to make a test match appearance so we can only judge him on his white ball cricket, which to this date has been impressive.
Willey makes up for his lack of pace by utilising the new ball up front and swinging the ball back in to a right handed batsman and as a variation just pushing the ball across them, looking for the outside edge. This plan is something we haven’t seen an England side put into practice, but now Eoin Morgan is flexing his right to tinker and experiment, setting specific fields and backing Willey to get him wickets up front.
Willey isn’t the only English left-armer we’ve seen in the past few years. Harry Gurney of Nottinghamshire was acquired by Alastair Cook in his reign as ODI skipper, before being departed with as part of the change-up in the one day set-up. A name for the future is the young seamer Reece Topley. Due to join Hampshire at the end of the season, this young man has been tipped for greatness over the coming years and at the age of 21 he is already seasoned on the county circuit.
The left arm-debate will roll on for years, “do we need a left armer like we need a spinner” will be what the coaching staff say to one another and they are right to ask the question as left-armers are becoming more and more tricky to play in all formats of the game.
