A Surprisingly Effective Way To Bowl A Reverse Swinging Yorker Very Few Know About.
It's a golden nugget of information I heard from an England fast bowler at the height of their career.
Thank you to those who joined the first of my monthly Zoom calls last week. It was fun digging into the weeds of people's bowling actions and engaging in some Q&A.
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It stems from my growing interest in why club bowlers with heaps of potential throw in the towel too soon. I've never been able to put my finger on it until recently.
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Let's dive in.
It started with a conversation on the outfield.
Jade Dernbach won't mind me mentioning that during a Surrey training session on the outfield at the Oval, he gave me a front-row seat into his intricate bowling method at the death overs of a game.
It was fascinating.
Here was a man at the peak of his powers, opening and bowling for England and winning games at will, talking through his process.
At the time, a statistic for Surrey showed that we won every time we got the game to the last over, and the opposition needed eight or more runs to win.
It was down to Jade's brilliance.
How he achieved his yorker struck me the most, and it came down to an unusual change in his action. It's a little more common now, but it was lesser known and not usually executed by English cricketers back then.
Jade explained anecdotally, "When I bowl with a new ball, I'm upright and try to swing the ball away from the right-hander with my front arm reaching up to the sky and coming down vertically and down the wicket, and then I pull it into my side, with a good upright posture at backfoot contact."
It was simple, very orthodox and everything we know about a solid upright position for fast bowlers.
Then, he explained a subtle contrast of what he does differently at the end of an innings. He aims to get the ball into the block hole under the batter's feet, which is a pretty standard strategy at every level.
But here's the twist.
He would change his action when he wanted to bowl a yorker, particularly a reverse swinging yorker at the end of the innings. Something he was renowned for.
Jade said, "I change my seam position so it is more like a 45 degree angle, and I do this by closing myself off with my back foot contact first by running in towards leg slip. I then change the position of my front arm and pull across my chest in a more horizontal movement."
What this does is change his release position so it’s slightly lower because he’s bowling around himself slightly.
Now, stick with me here because this gets really nerdy and into the weeds of what this post is all about.
He closes himself off at back foot contact
His forearm goes across his body and not down the wicket.
It means his bowling arm follows his front arm at a lower trajectory.
The lower release point changes the seam position, and the ball is released a bit like a flying saucer. Think of the seam position at around 20 minutes to 2 o'clock.
This lower release point shortens the distance to that blockhole yorker and reduces any bounce, which makes it harder for the batter to get their hands underneath the ball for trajectory.
The lower release height makes it a nightmare for batters to try to score, let alone hit a boundary.
But here's the thing.
The most significant part of the execution, which we randomly spoke about on the outfield, is this:
Ripping your fingers back down the ball on release imparts spin, which makes the ball reverse swing. So it's not true reverse swing through the ball-changing condition but through the backspin.
It was like a lightbulb that went off in my head. I thought, "Ah, okay, now that makes sense."
So, for Jade, the backspin on the ball meant that the ball was swinging into the right-hander, which is a nightmare scenario for batters who would have observed him swinging the newer ball away in his opening spell.
Final Thoughts.
It's a cue that worked for him, and it's the same thing that worked for Malinga and now Pathirana when they played in the IPL.
Bowlers who bowl with a lower release point and rip their finger back down the seam impart spin on the ball, allowing it to swing in the opposite direction, almost with a drift-like effect a spinner would get.
It might not be textbook reverse swing, but who cares? It gets the job done.
Author Note:
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