Was spin bowling once an easier art?

[twctopcat]

I don't know if this is the case, am asking out of pure curiosity, but was it easier to be a more successful(statistically speaking) spinner in years gone by? Due to uncovered pitches and other factors etc which resulted in a lot of spinners e.g laker ending up with such low averages, not to mention even older spinners such as rhodes and verity, who ended up with ridiculously low FC averages.Or was it just the case that they were technically brilliant?

 

[Neil Pickup]

Pitches, IMO

 

[Ford_GTHO351]

Yes it can be uncoverved pitches.

Though what hurts current spinners averages in particular is attacking batting employed these days by batsmen.

 

[twctopcat]

True, but the whole point of spin bowling is deception to the point that hand eye co-ordination of a batsman cannot counter whatever a spin bowler is making the ball do. Therefore the more a batsman attacks the ball, the more likely he is to get an edge etc, that is if the bowler in question has a lot of variation. Many pitches (away from the subcontinent) no doubt add to this fact that averages are going up however because of the lack of options they give to spin bowling.

 

[Tom Halsey]

Pitches for me, too.

 

[Pratters]

I am of the opinion that a good spin bowler in one era would be good in every other era. Pitches may help him to improve stats but a good spinner will remain good. A lot of bowlers today are not flighting the ball enough due to the one day cricket which is the reason they are not bein successful. You look at the Pakistani spinners right now or the Indian spinners of the 70s... they all used to flight the ball except Chandra.

The spinners which are doing well right now, be it Warne, Murali or the lesser category of vettoris and prices, all flight the ball.

 

[FRAZ]

There is an old saying that a young beginner fast bowler with a messed up action later becomes an Off spinner ...... Right ?

 

[Tom Halsey]

Yup.

When Warne and Murali were young, they both used to bowl medium.

They switched to spin for various reasons.

 

[Pratters]

Yup.

When Warne and Murali were young, they both used to bowl medium.

They switched to spin for various reasons.

And Kumble still bowls medium pace..

 

[Tom Halsey]

Very true.

 

[Richard]

Giles, of course, used to be a seamer.
If you ask me a wristspinner can be a dangerous bowler anywhere, a fingerspinner can be dangerous only once the pitch offers a certain amount of turn.
Otherwise it is simply not possible for a human hand to impart the neccesary spin to turn the ball dangerously.
There can surely be no question that uncovered wickets caused these conditions to prevail far more often and hence fingerspin used to be effective far more often than it is now.
Flight, with loop and drift, is very useful but only as a compliment to turn. It will simply make a dangerous bowler even more dangerous. It will not make an innocuous bowler a dangerous one.
If you try to attack spin when the ball is turning, meanwhile, the chances are you'll pay for it sooner rather than later, so I don't think attacking batting has made potentially good bowlers less so.

 

[Tom Halsey]

I agree with everything you say here.

 

[anzac]

Giles, of course, used to be a seamer.
If you ask me a wristspinner can be a dangerous bowler anywhere, a fingerspinner can be dangerous only once the pitch offers a certain amount of turn.
Otherwise it is simply not possible for a human hand to impart the neccesary spin to turn the ball dangerously.
There can surely be no question that uncovered wickets caused these conditions to prevail far more often and hence fingerspin used to be effective far more often than it is now.
Flight, with loop and drift, is very useful but only as a compliment to turn. It will simply make a dangerous bowler even more dangerous. It will not make an innocuous bowler a dangerous one.
If you try to attack spin when the ball is turning, meanwhile, the chances are you'll pay for it sooner rather than later, so I don't think attacking batting has made potentially good bowlers less so.

very good & very true...........

IMO not only were the uncovered pitches a factor but also the pitches today are 'dead' in comparison - as per the flat tracks thread - no bite on Day1 for the seamers & no turn on Day 5 for the finger spinners in particular.......hence why AUS has a preference / prevalence for wristies atm..........

 

[Langeveldt]

Better Pitches
Better Bats
Better Outfields

Id say its harder bowling in general these days, whatever you happen to be bowling...

 

[FRAZ]

And you know why Subcontinent spinners are good. Coz of their natural thin and FLEXIBLE wrist . And actually their fingers also are thin and so their grip is firm and placement of fingers is very flexible . Not me saying only The experts do say this thing also ... right ?

 

[Ford_GTHO351]

If you try to attack spin when the ball is turning, meanwhile, the chances are you'll pay for it sooner rather than later, so I don't think attacking batting has made potentially good bowlers less so.

I can understand your point of view.

Though say these days with batsmen being more agressive and looking to score runs on almost every single ball, some spin bowlers for example in this situation may attempt to bowl the flipper and instead it may come out of the hand wrong or that they may bowl a full toss and it gets whacked for six.

Turn back time say some 35 years ago or more and there was no such thing as ODI's and the pressures that spin bowlers must be under these days, especially if they are bowling at the death in ODI's with batsmen looking to whack you every single ball, it does affect sipinners performances.

So I think that attacking batting has some part in affecting perfomances of current or past spinners.

 

[Richard]

Bad deliveries (ie bad deliveries to any batsmen, eg Full-Tosses at 50 mph) have nearly always had maximum punishment aimed at them.
Perhaps more batsmen are using their feet nowadays than used to (ie turning good deliveries into bad ones) and perhaps "Long-Hop length" is a little wider in dimension now than it used to be.
But none of this, IMO, changes the fact that if the ball is turning use of feet is fraught with danger and will almost invariably result in downfall before too long, and that turning short-balls are much harder to hit than non-turning balls of identical length.
On the occasions when you do get turning wickets (eg in Sri Lanka) good bowlers are still getting figures as good as in the '50s and '60s.
Look at Harbhajan in the famous 2000\01 Border-Gavaskar Trophy. The Australians tried to attack him as much as anyone and he got 28 wickets in the last 2 Tests. They often paid for their aggressiveness; he bowled well and their aggressiveness didn't stop him.
IMO if spin-friendly conditions occurred with the same regularity now as in the '50s and '60s, more aggressive batsmen would in fact mean spinners would get better figures rather than worse.
Perhaps increased strokeplay has worsened the figures of a routine fingerspinner caused by less spin-friendly wickets, but it wouldn't have created that effect in itself.

 

[Richard]

And you know why Subcontinent spinners are good. Coz of their natural thin and FLEXIBLE wrist . And actually their fingers also are thin and so their grip is firm and placement of fingers is very flexible . Not me saying only The experts do say this thing also ... right ?

The renowned experts.
Who's to say you're any less of an expert than anyone of renown?
But I don't think subcontinental people are especially likely to be better spin-bowlers than those from elsewhere. If you ask me there's no reason to suspect geography would effect thin, flexible fingers and wrists.
If you ask me subcontinental teams produce effective spinners most often because they produce more spin-friendly wickets than anywhere else. No other reason.

 

[someblokedave]

In the case of Wrist Spinners - Grimmett for instance, he was an innovator and technically brilliant. The bloke practiced virtually every day of his life into his 80's and would only end his practice sessions if he landed the ball 5 times consecutively on a small hankie. You've got to remember these blokes lived for cricket and weren't consumed with their own self image in the same way as the ***** these days are, what with their Twitter accounts, mobile phones and playing computer games.

Are these threads really as dead as this - is there anyone out there?

 

[vcs]

Weird bump.