Stuart MacGill Wrist Spin Basics 

ok. here's an idea that might appeal to aspiring spin bowlers on G+... actually, it might also appeal to perspiring spin bowlers, who are equally welcome to get involved! This is my very first coaching video. Its far from perfect, but i'm satisfied that at the very least it provides players with a reasonable starting point. If you like it, please feel free to share. Anyway, enough of me bowling, I'm old and we need some new spinners... I would like to invite any spin bowlers out there to film themselves bowling in the nets (front-on, side-on and from behind the bowlers arm) then post it on RU-vid Then I'd like you to send me the link... I'll have a look, make some notes, then provide you with my feedback as well as any suggestions I might have to help you improve. #spin #bowling #cricket #cricketcoaching Cricket Australia Circle of Cricket

hi dave, great to hear from you again. drift is certainly something that you can work on. here's the basics. you can create top spin & side spin or a combo of both. side spin = drift, top spin = drop. the more revolutions on the ball, the more dramatic the drift/drop. when i was in my teens, drift was my only option. i gradually came to prefer drop. i reckon a good batsman on a good pitch can cope with drift, because the ball generally lands where its expected.

the comments about being first are simply outstanding. full. stop.

Hey magilla, I think it's fantastic that you have posted this video. We all love hearing/seeing this great insight into your bowling. Really appreciate it mate. Keep it up.

You are a genius Stu. Been a fan for years, and will always be. You, Bill O Reilly and Warnie were the best spin bowlers we ever had.

Fantastic upload. I really believe this will help innumerable leg spinners out there, including myself. As there are few coaches around that know leg spin intimately, videos like these are precious and will be replayed, paused and analysed over and over. Your knowledge, talent and experience is a godsend. Keep em up and please try seal a deal for the Sydney Sixers next season! :)

i guess the bounce is a product of the top spin... the rotation of my body produced sufficient sideways movement (often short outside off!) so that my main focus was getting over the top. Richie is the coolest leggie to walk the planet (warnie would agree!) so we love his appraisals of our bowling; just remember that he has described deliveries in the past bowled by shane and myself as "the back-spinning top-spinner..." no doubt he loves it, but maybe he could do with a trip to the physics lab!

Excellent video stuart, this is something the wrist spin community on the internet has been waiting for for some years now, on our forum we've been saying that someone should pick up where Jenner left off and it's brilliant that you've done it and you've added to all the stuff that's out there already with a different take/angle and you're totally 100% credible - one of the geniuses of the art!

from my first ball in test cricket, all anyone seemed to notice was the excessive rotation of my body at delivery. my bowling arm seemed to drag across the pitch towards mid-wicket. often this was used to illustrate the fact that i bowled round-arm and consequently used side-spin only. i soon found out that it was impossible to knock over a quality player if you just turned them big. thankfully, despite my body i had good control of my wrist... topspin was soon to become my main focus

Stuart I think that's because we discuss this stuff in great depth over on our forum and we've been discussing these topics for years now on Big cricket and my little forum, Funk, me and some others are just gobsmacked that you're on here discussing this with us, it's amazing!

Stuart has some great knowledge and getting coached by him must be really insightfull. Hes definitely one of the best spin bowlers Australia have ever had...this man could turn a ball on glass.

"I just meant that you used both a combination of over-spin and your body mechanics..." funk192, 3.12.2012 i don't mean to be overly excited here mate, but i have NEVER heard an amateur spin bowler use these terms before. the aspect of your comment that particularly excites me is your willingness to consider that there are several different tools that we have at our disposal when attempting to spin the ball. you have the potential to become a great coach one day...

Hi Stu! Massive fan. You and Warney in tandem was as close to magic of an art almost lost! Please put up more cricket videos, love this stuff.

Unbelievable! Stuart man! Just say "hi" back to make it my first ever communication with a real international cricket star. You're too humble to individually respond to the guys asking for advice here. Cheers mate.

hi mate, thanks for getting in touch. nothing wrong with being a fast bowler trapped inside a spin bowlers body! upload a video to youtube of your bowling and i'll make some suggestions.. stu

the specialist coach i worked with mostly was peter philpott. i liked the way he explained things to me. lster on the coach that surprised me the most was troy cooley. he is without doubt the most well rounded, informed bowling coach ive met. his grasp of big picture and understanding of everything from biomech to individual triggers was awesome.

Stuart I want you to talk about how you bowl the sidespin leg break and ur big turning googly. That will be every helpful!

I like how you say 'too easy' towards the end, Stuey. The game is always too easy if you're Stuart MacGill. I have tried leg-spin during my school years and was honestly not very good at it. My weight wouldn't go in with the delivery and so it ended up pitching on a rather short-ish length at a slow pace making it a near-perfect recipe for the batsman to belt the covers out of the ball lol.

great upload stuart great adivce.. will send through some footage of myself in the next week

Hey G'day Mac, I'm a leg spinner for Fairfield-Liverpool in Sydney Grade Cricket. I just wanted some tactical tips from you. Firstly, how do you bowl to batsmen who are brave enough to use their feet against you every single delivery? And secondly, how do you deal with batsmen who use the crease pretty well and take a big stride back in to their crease and cut or pull your full/good length delivery? Cheers buddy :)

Thanks Stu, you're a Champion!

Hey Stuart, great to see you here. I´ve been improving my legspin over the last few seasons and have found some consistency but still have problems with bouncy pitches and guys using their feet and coming forward. Not many spin bowlers where I am to ask for help. Please help with showing your arsenal including backspin legspin and anything else you

thanks Magilla great video for anyone learning the bowl leggies.

I want to see a video of u showing how to bowl with more side spin and your good big turning googly! That will be very helpful!

hey stuart you had the best wrong un in the game can you please upload so tip on how to bowl it thanks

Great video, mate! Nice to see someone focusing on personal comfort, not just copying Warne. Any chance we may see one in the future regarding timing the release of the ball (position of arm), as well as, hand positioning for each of the variations?

thanks stuart for the great tips

very kind thankyou mate.. i loved bowling leggies

Yeah from our discussions and analysis between a handful of us including a bio-mechanist we've looked at many aspects of the action that produce the spin and we've all tried to incorporate different component parts into our own bowling with differing degrees of success. We've all come to realise that it's a multitude of diffrent tools are there to use and that it's not only down to the inclusion of the different component parts of the action, but also physique. Warnes physique for instance is...

Still trying to pick up tips on leg spin bowling all the time from watching Warnie's, Terry Jenner's, and Richie Benaund's Tutorials. This is different, all their tutorials are mainly about what you're supposed to do at the pitch (they do all mention the follow through though, "everything is aimed at the batsman..."), this video is more about the delivery stride and follow through though. Awesome to get a different perspective :)

Hello Stuart, Perhaps you are the best person to answer my question - why is there a sudden decline in quality leg spinners ? Some time ago there were quite a few, such as yourself , warne, kumble, mushtaq , Paul strang wasn't too bad. Now I look around and see only Amit Mishra and Imran Tahir and both of whom haven't quite established their class. And incidentally there s been a sudden upsurge in no. of left arm finger spinners !!!

Hey I just started bowling leggies, I used to bowl pace, and was very fast for my age, I hurt my back not long ago and started bowling spin in the nets because I couldn't bowl pace, I took a shine to it and started spinning them a fair bit. I watched this and really found this stuff very use full, but I am still having some problems with consistently flighting the ball, any tips would be much appreciated, great vid mate. Thanks, Callum

unfortunately i don't think there is any high speed camera footage of my bowling... i was desperate for them to film me, but there was only one camera at a game and they always pointed it at someone else... thinking about it, warney's wrist does look reasonably fixed, but i think the enormous strength he had in his fingers, wrist and forearm made up for any lack of rotation. he still "loaded up" pretty early though.

Stuart , thanks so much for uploading this....your bowling is an inspiration to aspiring leg spinners at very level of the game! Some really good tips in here I will put straight into practice. Do you have any tips to cut the amount of off-side wides I bowl. They just seem to come from nowhere and destroy my confidence!

Are you still doing this? If I send a video will you give me some feedback ?

Ben look at the vids here on youtube, they're often accompanied by the speed that Stuart bowls at, if think generally Stuart bowled at 47-51 mph, similar to Warne. Alfridi (Pakistan) is probably the fastest around recently bowling between 53-60mph frequently. I'd imagine at club level you'd be seeing bowling in the lower 40 mph region. At pro levels, you'd get that extra speed with massively increased accuracy, dip, drift, turn and exploitation of your weaknesses - totally different.

very interested in your observation mate... i DID like to flight the ball more, but that meant that i needed to make it move in the air at some stage, otherwise i would have simply been a slow bowler. have a think about why you always thought this way (ps its not a bad thing; i welcome the comments) and i'll do my best to respond

Hey Stuart, im a leg spinner from South Africa. At the moment struggling to give my leggie a real rip and get it to spin sharply. I have always been amazed as to how much spin you could impart on the ball throughout your career. Any advice you could give me would be much appreciated. Thanks a lot, Jason

Stuart, I've just emailed you along these lines - big series of questions that would be far easier to answer in video/interview form. But in essence I'm asking questions that we all pondered on bigcricket all the time - what training you do, when, why and how. How frequently, aiming to do what, fitness regimes, was it self directed, or under instruction and what did you do before becoming a pro and did you put in the hours as a kid when you were learning?

sir , i have great problems in finishing the delivery please do explain how i can come over it???

Stuart who were you under when you were being trained at test level and what was the training like, we hear and read stories of Warne not training it seems till Jenner turned up as his mentor, but then Swanne here in the UK was taking the mick out of Panesar because he puts in up to 6 hours a day in training. Philpott and Grimmett were both advocates of long hours and total focus when training, what was your regime like and was it done intrinsically or extrinsically?

thankyou kaartoo. what would you like me to discuss next time?

Hey stuart, i've recently picked up legspin and have since become completely obsessed with it. However I have a couple of questions on the topic and i thought you would be the perfect person to talk to! (for obvious reasons). I was wondering if top class spinners (like yourself) actually bowl faster than what it looks like on t.v? A lot of spinners i face tend to just toss the ball up into orbit and wait for a miss hit. What are your thoughts? cheers, Ben

Stuart when you were still bowling did they ever analyse your bowling using high speed cameras and did you ever get to see the playback in ultra - slow motion? I'm asking because you say that you had good control of your wrist - did you ever get to see this e.g. exactly what your wrist was doing in the delivery? I can grasp that the Top Spinner has a lot of wrist action to it, but is the lesser case with a Leg Break? Warnes wrist alway looks fairly rigid in the slo-mo footage.

hey stuart.. i m not leg spinner, i m an off spinner... could you plz help me out? i m sure you must have the knowledge about off spin as well as you have played for a long time for australia... the problem is i have hurt my index finger and i m bowling with applying band aid on it.. next problem is my seam position in the air is not perfect.. it should be 45 degress but my seam postion is like an outswinger for the fast bowler.. and plz tell me the way to upload my bowling video..

Stuart, are you watching any of the England v India at the moment as it's a total spin-fest, but something I've always been intrigued by is (And they've picked up on this in the current test) that some bowlers can produce drift and others seemingly can't? Swanne & Panesar are and the Indian bowlers are not. Is drift something that (If you can get it) you can do and not do intentionally when you're bowling and if so - how... What's the secret?

pls be sure to send me a link to a video of your bowling jason and i'll get to work asap

whats the link to your vid thanks mate?

Miss you in the team Macca. :\

hi mate, don't hesitate to post video in any case... if you're embarrassed just limit it between you and i... it might be handy to see how things change over the coming months. your call stu

#2 is pretty unique and it's a mistake to try and emulate his style and approach entirely because we're not built like Warne. We've explored and discussed the fact that success comes from a combination of factors and that the action is a whole body process and more, from what happens at the fingers, through the wrist, arms, shoulders, core, hips, toes and the amount of purchase you get fron the surface of the wicket with your studs. All of which have some impact on what happens with the ball!

i reckon best case is to have as much rotation as possible in your wrist, every little counts. possibly the best at this was murali... RE training; my dad bowled leggies and played half a dozen matches for WA late 60's early 70's... he used to bowl every day, so that's what i did; right up until the time i played for nsw. at this point, the match days increased so dramatically that nets were used predominantly as top up work mid season.

Hi Stu still waiting for your feedback.....is it becoz of long waiting list :)

love you stew ill send you a video and if you could be my bowlng coach that would be great

if they hit THROUGH the ball, there is often no penalty for them not moving their feet. on the other hand, when the ball drops, batsmen who are lazy or don't watch the ball closely enough often hit the ball in the air or get beaten off the wicket because they haven't got to the pitch of the ball. obviously bowlers who are great examples of either will have a great deal of success. my personal preference was drop, shane's was drift.

i made a video response with my action do you think u could take a look and give me a few tips and things to work on?

Hey Stuart, I'm late starter to leg spin bowling. I would love to send you some videos to get some tips. I can turn the ball a long way and have a good wrong en that turns sharp. I have been taking wickets , but I seem to train and bowl a lot better and when it gets to the game I tense up and get nervous. I get worried about pitching it to full and also to short as they get punished. Any tips would be awesome. How do I send the videos to you .? Cheers cal k

Excellent video, lots of usefull stuff in there. I didn't realise you were so fast through the crease. I've uploaded a vid of myself bowling. I can spin it well enough - accuracy could be better. Any comments would be much appreciated.

Hello Stuart, click on the bluemountainvideo1 link above, its first one on my channel Cheers mate, and many thanks for your time.

FIRST!

the indian batsmen should be ashamed of the complete lack of respect they showed panesar and swann. drift alone should not unravel a test batting lineup, least of all the indian top 6. great bowling from both of the english spinners, who showed an ability to mix up the degree of top/side spin applied to each delivery, no disrespect at all to the indian bowlers. they were beaten by their batsmen.