Left-arm wristspinners

[Top_Cat]

Because the ones doing that with the right arm are incredibly small and mediocre?

?

 

[Richard]

Yeah, Adams did bowl many googlies. May have been the stock delivery and he certainly used the shoulder.

I can't recall ever seeing Adams bowl a standard wristspinner's Break delivery. His stock-ball was the Googly. Not to say he never did, but I never saw him manage it. He did spin his Googly plenty though, and turned it far more than your normal left-arm fingerspinner. Had he been able to bowl with Warne-esque accuracy, he'd have been quite some bowler.

As for left-arm wristspin in general - well there've been precious few right-arm wristspinners who've achieved anything much at the Test level - the SAfrican trio of Schwarz, Vogler and Faulkner were pretty much the first; then there was Grimmett and O'Reilly; then Benaud and Gupte (both of whom's success was relatively short-lived), then a massive gap to Warne and Murali.

Not sure what the ratio of right-arm to left-arm bowlers is, but I'm pretty sure it's fairly tall. It's not terribly surprising, with the tiny number of wristspinners who can spin the ball as much as stock-in-trade wristspinners do and still bowl with the requistite control to be something better than a joke, that there hasn't yet been a left-armer among the select few. The day will come eventually I'm sure, but it might not be any time soon.

Aside from Adams (who as I say is a Googly bowler first and foremost - what's the variation for most wristspinners is the stock for him), I guess the most successful Test left-arm wristspinner is David Sincock, and that's really not saying much.

 

[zaremba]

there've been precious few right-arm wristspinners who've achieved anything much at the Test level - the SAfrican trio of Schwarz, Vogler and Faulkner were pretty much the first; then there was Grimmett and O'Reilly; then Benaud and Gupte (both of whom's success was relatively short-lived), then a massive gap to Warne and Murali.

During this gap (!), Chandrasekhar and Qadir took 242 and 239 Test wickets respectively. Which was more than any of their predecessors whom you have named except for Benaud who took 248.

And let's not forget IDK Salisbury who in 15 Tests took 20 wickets at an average of just below 77.

 

[zaremba]

Not sure what the ratio of right-arm to left-arm bowlers is, but I'm pretty sure it's fairly tall. It's not terribly surprising, with the tiny number of wristspinners who can spin the ball as much as stock-in-trade wristspinners do and still bowl with the requistite control to be something better than a joke, that there hasn't yet been a left-armer among the select few. The day will come eventually I'm sure, but it might not be any time soon.

Yep this is probably a fair explanation.

 

[Richard]

During this gap (!), Chandrasekhar and Qadir took 242 and 239 Test wickets respectively. Which was more than any of their predecessors whom you have named except for Benaud who took 248.

Yeah, forgot about Abdul Qadir TBH, though he wasn't successful everywhere, only at home.

Chandrasekhar, though a wristspinner, like Kumble I tend to leave-out of the wristspin question as they were both notably different from the stock-standard wristspinner, firing it through quickly and generally very flat, and in Kumble's case a) spinning it little more than a fingerspinner and b) being more about topspin than sidespin.

 

[chris.hinton]

Its is really hard for a Left arm Leggie to make it

 

[Richard]

It's really hard for a right-arm leggie to make it too. Wristspin (with typical large amounts of spin) is exceptionally difficult to bowl - it's as simple as that. Most people who try will never have the requistite accuracy to bowl at FC domestic level, never mind Test.