Which is more exciting to watch: Spin bowling or fast bowling

Spin

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by John Welford

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My vote definitely goes to the spinners! There is always something happening when the spinners get to work, which is not always the case when the fast guys are in action.

For one thing, a spin bowler only takes a short run-up, so less time is spent with the bowler simply walking back to his mark before starting the next delivery. For another, a spin bowler is far less likely to overstep the mark and deliver a no-ball. When a fast guy does this, off he goes plodding back to his mark to try again!

Spin bowling has so many varieties to it. There are finger spinners and wrist spinners, and there are leg spinners and off spinners. Even though a spin bowler is likely to be either one or the other, i.e. either off or leg, either finger or wrist, there is so much he can do to vary his delivery from ball to ball, all designed to befuddle the batsman.

For example, he can give the ball more "air", by sending it at a slower pace with greater height. This is likely to give the ball more "bite" when it hits the pitch so that it deviates to a greater extent than might be expected. He can decide to bowl from either side of the stumps so as to vary the direction of the delivery. Sometimes this might involve asking the umpire to stand back from the stumps so that the bowler runs between the stumps and the umpire.

A cunning slow bowler might make use of marks left on the pitch by the fast bowlers who have run through when bowling from the opposite direction. If a ball pitches in a footmark it is quite likely to turn in an unexpected way.

However, what every batsman dreads is the "wrong un", meaning the ball that should break one way but goes the other. This is the famed "googly" (or "chinaman" if the bowler is left-handed) that the best spinners are able to disguise so that the batsman has no idea what to expect. Sometimes the bowler might send a "flipper" out of the back of the hand, or a ball with no spin at all that goes straight on when it hits the pitch.

When the spinner is in action, the fielding team is quite likely to have several players standing quite close to the batsman, in positions with quaint names such as "silly mid-off". With the ball coming at a relatively slow pace, the batsman may well nick the ball with the edge of the bat, possibly on to his pad so that it balloons into the air but does not travel much distance. It therefore pays to have a man close by to take the catch.

When this happens, the batsman will be under great pressure and will need maximum concentration. An added problem will be that all those fielders surrounding him are likely to be saying all sorts of things to try to put him off!

However, the excitement of seeing a spinner in action is not all to do with the bowling. The ball is coming at the batsman more slowly, and so the batsman has more time to work out the stroke to play. If he has read the ball correctly, or the bowler has got it wrong, the batsman stands a good chance of playing a scoring shot. Far more sixes are scored, proportionately, off spinners than off fast bowlers. These shots are always crowd-pleasers! Also, with the fielders in close for bat-and-pad catches, there are bound be wide open spaces for the batsman to hit into, with the chance of getting a boundary.

The wicket-keeper is also called into play in a different way when the spinners are on. Apart from standing close to the stumps to take an edged catch, he is in a good position to get a stumping. This is because one way to defend against a spinner is to hit the ball before it has had a chance to deviate off the pitch. This means advancing out of the crease, but it is a risky ploy if you miss the ball, because you then have to get your bat back into the crease before the keeper has whipped off the bails and stumped you.

Yes, give me the spinners every time! Unfortunately, there is less spin bowling in matches than there used to be, for various reasons, and cricket has suffered as a spectator sport because of this. However, there is still a role for the spin bowler in any form of the game, and a team that neglects to pick a spin bowler could be making a big mistake. As a watcher of the game, I love to see variety and to know that something exciting could happen at any second. I reckon that this is more likely when there is a spinner in action!

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