Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

36 The Bowler course gaining pace off the wicket, continues more quickly than expected. And there is just a suggestion that he may have even tried the variation known today as the flipper, which, like the normal top spinner, ‘hurries of [sic] the pitch, but tends to be a flat delivery, giving the impression of being a long hop rather than a half volley’. 71 Gerry Lester alone of the players to whom I talked claimed that he bowled the ‘arm-ball’; but his regular alternative was a genuine leg-break. His father, his first and most important teacher, was a famously successful leg-break bowler in club cricket; and Knight, his county colleague in his first few years in county cricket must surely have encouraged him to make this delivery part of his armoury, 72 for the old professional wrote: Leg-break spin … is not so easy of accomplishment, or rather to maintain the indispensable length at which alone it is effective is a very difficult art. The ball when delivered is underneath the hand, slipping out as it were when fingers and wrist have turned the ball over. Hence pace, the strength needed for propulsion, is rarely found conjoined with leg break. Nearly all of us can bowl a ball with a big leg break in the nets, but “fear seizeth upon them and trouble” when the nets are removed and a match substituted. The leg break ball when well bowled is one presenting greater difficulty than the off break. One can always get more leg break spin, even on the most perfect of wickets, than off break. The batsman too is not as a rule sufficiently clever with his feet as to permit him to get so clear and distinct as view of the leg ball as is essential for a correct judgment of its length. Only get batsmen to play out to your leg break, and if it is a break (so much bowling termed leg break is merely leg theory) you ought easily to get him caught in the slips in playing forward or from mis-hits almost anywhere. Leg-break bowling often has a curious swimming flight from the pitch instead of coming at a direct angle, and this peculiarity often leads a batsman following the ball into the making of strokes which look very bad and poky. Nothing in fact is more difficult to play correctly than a perfect leg break, a ball dropping on the leg stump to bowl the off bail; but no bowling is so bad, so easily and so safely punished, as bad leg break bowling. Over-pitch the ball and it presents the easiest of full tosses; short pitched, the batsman can hit it anywhere on the off side as the break takes it away from him, while the exigencies of your bowling demand a field almost exclusively planted on the on side. 73 Already in his first full season we find Astill ‘serv[ing] up that leg-break of which he is so fond’; and especially during his heyday in the 1920s and 1930s he frequently did not use it so much for surprise as in consistent spells and was sometimes in fact simply described in match reports as ‘a 71 Description by T.E.Bailey. 72 Astill probably received little if any help from the county coaches. Knight observed ( The Complete Cricketer , pp 92-94) that in his experience coaches, while delivering themselves of ‘golden words’ on batting, exercised a great reticence in giving their charges advice on how to bowl, even so great and enthusiastic a bowler as the old Yorkshire and England player and Leicestershire coach Tom Emmett vouchsafing nothing ‘beyond an odd “pitch ‘em up”’. 73 Ibid., pp 112-13.