Bowling
Any ball that goes straight can be hit, no matter how fast it is, because it is predictable. The whole art is making the ball do something the batter did not order, and doing it late enough that they have already committed.
Bowling is rhythm before it is anything else. Run in on a straight line, stand tall, and look at your target over the front shoulder. The front arm pulling down hard is what makes the bowling arm come over fast.
Rhythm before effort
Bowling is rhythm. If your feet, legs, arms and head are in good positions it takes half the effort and gives you double the accuracy. Stand tall, run in on a straight line, and look at your target over the front shoulder.
Reach for the sky
A high arm gives you bounce, and bounce is the thing batters find hardest to judge. The front arm pulls down hard and fast, and the bowling arm follows it through. Do not stop the action at release.
Pace comes from sequence, not from straining
The quick bowlers who look easy are not holding back. They are getting the hips, the front arm and the shoulder to fire in the right order, which is a skill you can practise slowly.
Brett Lee breaking down how Jofra Archer generates pace off a short run, which is mostly about the front arm and the hips rather than effort.
Brett Lee on Jofra ArcherTop of off stump
The length that makes a batter unsure whether to go forward or back. Aim there, and make driving look as tempting as cold water on a hot day.
Pace out your mark, and use it
Walk the run up out from the crease once, put something down where it starts, and begin from that spot every single ball. A run up that starts somewhere different each time is a different action each time, and no amount of aiming at the stumps will tidy that up.
The target is six to eight metres
Measured from the batter’s stumps, in a channel about forty centimetres wide off the edge of off stump. Top order Test batters average around 22 against balls that land there, which is lower than any other length. That is the target, and it is smaller than it sounds.
Nobody hits it more than half the time
The most accurate seam bowler in Test cricket lands in that zone on 48.5 per cent of his deliveries. Tenth on the same list manages 42. Sixty three per cent in one innings was the best anybody had managed in Test cricket since 2016. So four good ones in an over is not you failing at the other two. That is the game.
Ashley Mallett thought he was bowling well and getting unlucky, until he worked out he could not be that good and that unlucky for that long. Clarrie Grimmett told him the secret: get the ball above eye level, make it dip, and the batter is at sea.
Bowl to the shot, not to the spot
Stop thinking about a patch of grass. Think about the shot you want them to play, and then bowl the ball that invites it.
Shane Warne.Vary the pace, not the length
Make every ball look the same until it starts to dip. If the batter can read your speed out of the hand, the dip never gets a chance to fool them.
One change, then look at him
Pace, length, angle on the crease, which end you come from. Alter one of those and his next shot tells you something. Alter three and the over has taught you nothing, and you have handed a set batter three new things to enjoy.
Same arm, different wrist
A batter reads your arm long before he can read your hand. So the arm does the same thing every ball and the wrist does the work. Jasprit Bumrah’s arm path barely changes between an inswinger, an outswinger, a bouncer and a yorker, and by the time the wrist is readable the ball is halfway down the pitch.
Let it go closer to him
Bumrah releases the ball about half a metre nearer the batter than other top bowlers, which takes time away from a batter without adding a single kilometre an hour. You cannot copy his action and should not try. You can reach further down the pitch before you let go.
Learn the whole set slowly
Every variation is one small change to a repeatable action. Own the stock ball first, then add one at a time.
The moon ball, and a run through how to bowl the whole set of variations.
how to bowl all the ballsMoving the ball is not enough. Moving it late is the thing, like a fisherman pulling the line at the exact moment the fish bites.
A batter cannot swing at a ball that arrives under the bat, which is why this is the hardest ball in cricket to get away and the one most worth a thousand repetitions in the nets.
Full on fifth or sixth stump
Wide enough that swinging at it is a risk, full enough that leaving it is uncomfortable. It is the length that stops a batter simply having a bash at you.
The bouncer is a lever, not a weapon
You do not bowl it to hit anyone. You bowl it so the next ball, the full one, arrives at a batter who no longer trusts their front foot.
Pat Cummins using the bouncer not to hit anyone but to stop the batter getting fully forward, so the full ball that follows arrives at someone who no longer trusts their front foot.
Pat CumminsSomebody has to look after the ball
Shine on one side, keep it dry, and everybody in the team does it. A ball nobody maintains stops swinging by the tenth over, and then the bowlers have nothing.
Seam beats swing
Test batters average around 26.7 against a ball swinging a degree and a half or more in the air, and only around 20 against a ball moving three quarters of a degree off the pitch. Small and late beats big and early, because a batter can watch swing happen and cannot watch the pitch. Seam upright, pointed at the batter, and let the ground do it.
The wobble works because it fails
Hold the ball with the seam upright but let it wobble on the way down, and it lands on the seam sometimes and on the leather other times. It does not move every ball, and that is exactly why it is hard: the batter cannot play the movement and cannot play the straight one either.
Spend your advantage while it exists
Work out what you are actually good at, work out how long it lasts, and use it then rather than saving it. Swing lives in the first few overs and nowhere else, so a bowler who swings it should be attacking in the first over, not finding a rhythm.
Mitchell Starc and the first over, the feature below, is this idea worked all the way through.
Special feature
The best ball you will ever bowl is the first one
Nineteen times Mitchell Starc has taken a wicket with the first over of a Test innings. James Anderson has done it nineteen times too, in seventy four more attempts. What Starc does with that ball is not complicated, and almost nobody else does it.
Not the most. The most per chance.
Starc does not hold the record for first over wickets, and it is worth saying so plainly because the claim is everywhere. Anderson has more, and Stuart Broad has more. Both of them bowled a great many more first overs to get there.
Take the years the two of them shared, doing the same job at the top of an innings, and the picture turns over.
The bars are drawn to scale and the two wicket marks are deliberately the same size. Anderson has more first over wickets than Starc across a whole career, because he bowled a whole lot more first overs. Over the years they shared, doing the same job, they have the same number and Starc got there in seventy four fewer overs.
Be careful with this statistic, because there are three of them and they get mixed up. Wickets in the first over of any spell he bowls is one question. Wickets in the first over of the innings is a different one. The number of innings in which he struck early is a third, and it is lower than his wicket count because he has twice taken more than one in the same over. This piece is about the first over of the innings and nothing else.
He bowls it full, and almost nobody else does
Not a good length. Fuller.
At the base of the stumps and the batter’s toes. Left arm over means it starts around off stump, and with a new ball swinging in it finishes at the stumps or the front pad. The batter is not allowed to leave it and is not allowed to wait.
Look at how he gets them out and the length gives itself away. They are bowled and they are lbw. They are not caught behind off a probing one outside off, because he is not bowling a probing one outside off. Three of his first ball wickets have come with the very first ball of a Test match, and all three were left handers: Dimuth Karunaratne at Galle in 2016, Rory Burns at the Gabba in 2021, and Yashasvi Jaiswal at Adelaide in 2024.
What stops everybody else is a convention, not a lack of skill. The done thing is to land one, find your rhythm, hit a length and build pressure. Every coach says it and most bowlers do it. What it means in practice is handing back the single most valuable ball of the innings as a free look, at the exact moment it is worth the most.
Everything is stacked your way, once
For exactly one delivery the bowler holds every advantage there is. Then it is gone for the rest of the day.
- The batter has faced nothing at all. No sighter, no read on the pace, no idea how much it is doing, and a trigger movement that has not been tested against anything.
- The ball is as hard and as shiny as it will ever be, so the most swing that innings will ever offer is available now and never again.
- Their feet are cold and yours are not. You have been warming up and they have been sitting in the shed with their pads on.
His advantage has a shelf life, so he spends it early
Jarrod Kimber’s reading of Starc is that he is not a swing bowler in the way the phrase is usually meant. He is a bowler who can move a brand new ball, and only for a few overs. That changes what the first over is. It is not one opportunity out of many. It is most of the opportunity there is.
CricViz, who measure this sort of thing for a living, supply the other half. Their reading is that a bowler like Starc takes the pitch out of the equation: frightening when there is something in the wicket, and no less dangerous when the surface is dead. On the three slowest pitches he had ever bowled on, he came away with five wickets twice and four once.
Put the two together and you have the whole bowler. His weapon is the ball, not the ground. A surface is much the same all day, so it can wait. A new ball is not, so it cannot. He is racing a clock, not a pitch.
Which is why the lesson is not bowl like Starc. It is this: work out what your own advantage actually is, work out how long it lasts, and spend it while it is still there.
You will get driven, and it is worth it
A full ball is a driveable ball. He goes for boundaries that a bowler hitting the deck outside off would not, and he accepts that.
The maths is not close. One wicket is worth far more than four runs, and a wicket in the first over is worth more than an ordinary one. If you are never hit for four in your first over, you are probably bowling too safe.
One wicket changes the next two hours
- Number three walks out into the exact conditions the openers were picked to survive.
- The captain can keep the field up, so the slips stay in and every other bowler gets an attacking field instead of a defensive one.
- The innings never gets a base under it, and the middle order ends up facing a ball that should have been forty overs old by the time they saw it.
- Ten other people start believing something, which is not a small thing and is the half nobody writes down.
Five things, on a Saturday
- Decide the length before you walk back, not while you are running in. Pick it, and pick it fuller than feels comfortable.
- Aim at the base of off stump rather than at a corridor. A corridor is a place you hope something happens. The stumps are a target that is out if you hit it.
- Shine one side from the first ball and keep the seam upright. Swing is the whole point of bowling full. A scuffed ball going full is just a half volley.
- Accept the boundary rather than flinching back to a length after one.
- Never bowl a loosener, because it is the batter’s first ball too and only one of you has been warming up.
Judge the ball, not what happened to it
The people who analyse this for a living do not count wickets to decide whether a ball was any good. CricViz built a model called expected wickets, shortened to xW, which takes the speed, swing, line and length of a delivery and asks what that ball would usually do against an ordinary batter, whether or not anything happened this time. Ben Jones, their head of insight, is the person who most often explains it in public.
It is worth knowing on a Saturday morning too. A jaffa that beats the outside edge and a long hop that gets a wicket go into the scorebook looking like opposites, and the scorebook has them the wrong way round.
So ask the better question after your first over. Not did I get one. Was it full, did it swing, and would it have hit. Answer those three honestly every week and you will get better whatever the scorebook says, which is the whole of it.
The counts are from ESPNcricinfo and cricket.com.au. The reading of Starc is from Jarrod Kimber and from CricViz. Both are listed on the sources page as attributed rather than quoted, because neither original could be read from where this was written.
It is not where the ball lands, it is how it arrives. Clarrie Grimmett to Ashley Mallett
Distances are measured from the batter's stumps, so six metres is nearly two thirds of the way down. The band is about forty centimetres wide as well as two metres long, sitting on the edge of off stump, and the most accurate seam bowler in Test cricket lands inside it on fewer than half his deliveries. On a shorter junior pitch every one of these numbers shrinks with it, so pace them out on the pitch you actually play on rather than trusting the figure.
What he is telling you before you bowl
A ball is in the air for about half a second, which is not long enough to work anything out. So the good bowlers do the working out before they run in, and everything they need is standing there in front of them holding a bat.
Watch him take guard and watch him tap the bat. Watch what his feet do in the moment before you let go, which is not the same as the stance he showed you. None of this is guesswork. A batter cannot set up to be good at everything, so whatever he has set up to be good at, he has also set up to be bad at something else, and it is usually written on him.
Look at his bottom hand
Where the bottom hand sits is the first thing to look at, because it tells you which half of the ground he can hit. A hand round the back of the handle closes the face, and a closed face is strong through the leg side and awkward through the off. Bowl him wide of off stump to dry him up, and straight when you want the lbw.
Narrow feet or wide feet
Feet close together is usually a back foot player. A wide stance is usually a front foot player. So bowl the other one. It is the same idea as giving him both lengths early to find out, except this time he told you before you had bowled a ball.
Watch where the bat comes down from
If the hands go back towards gully, his weight has gone with them and he cannot hit straight any more. He has to come across a straight ball, so a straight line and a straight field is the plan and the lbw is live. This is the fault the batting page spends a whole lesson on, seen from your end of the pitch.
His first move, not his stance
Nearly everybody moves before the ball is bowled. If he goes back and across he has given you the front of the crease, so bowl it full and straight at him. If he presses forward he has committed, so pull the length back. The stance is what he shows you. The trigger is what he actually does.
Count what he leaves
An over with no leaves in it is a batter who does not know where his off stump is, and that is the cheapest wicket in cricket. Keep putting it just outside off and wait for him to reach.
Then tell him something that is not true
Once you know what he is expecting, the wicket comes from breaking it. Four in the same place and then one that is different is worth more than five different balls. A ball that contradicts what a batter expected is harder to play than a good one he saw coming, and the better he is the worse it fools him, because he is the one relying on the pattern. The field is part of what you are telling him, and it does not have to be true.
From research on how batters anticipate, where a ball that contradicted the context beat better players more often than worse ones.Reading the pitch you are actually on
Six to eight metres is the right length in general, and general is not a pitch. The best length moves with what is under your feet, and the good bowlers change it before the batter works out that it needed changing. When India toured Australia their seamers landed a higher proportion of balls on a good line and length with the new ball than the home side did. Jasprit Bumrah went a fraction fuller when there was swing on offer, giving up some of his own accuracy to get it.
Four pitches, and what each one is telling you.
Green and damp: pitch it up
Grass and moisture make the ball move off the seam, and a ball that moves needs to reach the batter before it has finished moving. Fuller than you think, at the stumps, and let the pitch do the work. The one thing that wastes a green top is banging it in.
Hard and fast: back of a length
Bounce is the weapon and the length that uses it is a fraction shorter, so the ball arrives at the top of the bat rather than the middle. Full on a quick pitch is a half volley with extra pace on it.
Flat and slow: make him come to you
Nothing is happening off the pitch, so stop asking it to. Change the pace, change the angle on the crease, bowl at his feet and make him hit into the field. On a flat one the wicket usually comes from impatience, and it should be his.
Dry and worn: aim at the rough
Late in a game the surface has holes in it where feet have landed. That is a target now, for a spinner and for a seamer cutting one. Land it on the broken bit and the ball does something nobody has to be clever about.
When you do not know yet, bowl the good length
The first over is for finding out. Six to eight metres tells you how much bounce there is, how much it is moving and how quickly it comes on, and it is the length that costs least while you are learning. Change once you know something, not before.