Jimmy: My Story by James Anderson

Author:James Anderson [Anderson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-24T20:02:00+00:00

Now this particular Shane was right. I was trying to unearth ways of being successful, and was quietly confident I had. The proof of the pudding is always in the eating, though. The reason for my optimism, over and above the fact that my twenty-three wickets against Pakistan had come at a cost of less than fourteen runs apiece only a matter of weeks earlier, was that I had bowled pretty well in South Africa the previous winter with the Kookaburra ball. Although I did factor in that in Australia it would not swing as much or for as long as it did in South African conditions.

Yes, I did have memories – however painful – of our previous Ashes tour but stored alongside them were observations of what the Australians had done well against us to take twenty wickets in matches with such regularity. Stuart Clark had been really successful, as had the metronomic master Glenn McGrath, just by hitting the seam. Naturally, I had been thinking ahead to the Ashes throughout our series with Pakistan, and how I could prosper down under. And in Mohammad Asif I had someone on the opposition who was a fine exponent of wobble-seam. It was at this juncture that I began working on my own version in the nets. It was a delivery that I began to bowl regularly at England practice sessions throughout the season, and introduced it into a game for the Lord’s Test against Pakistan, although it was not something necessarily picked up on from anyone outside our camp. I just wanted to road-test it before we left on the Ashes tour.

Instead of gripping the ball along the seam as fast bowlers have traditionally done, switching your finger position to bowl either an off-cutter or leg-cutter, you hold it across the seam so that rather than travelling through the air proud, the seam wobbles. Now I don’t know whether you have noticed but that seam thinga-majig is actually made of rope and is not smooth, so if it lands on it, rather than travelling on straight, it more often than not changes direction. The idea behind wobble-seam as opposed to traditional seam bowling being that if the seam is wobbling about, it could hit either edge of it on impact with the pitch. Now if I don’t know which way the ball is going to jag off the surface, then how on earth will the batsmen know? To my mind, if you are hitting a certain spot on the pitch regularly and the batsman knows it can go one way or the other, or indeed straight on, you are always in the game as a bowler.

It took a while to get used to bowling wobble-seam because it is a totally different grip from the one I use when I am trying to swing the ball. Whenever you swing the ball you are trying to accentuate its flight path with a combination of your wrist, hand and fingers, all working in unison to encourage it to bend in a certain way.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.