Beyond the Googly: The Mental Game of Leg Spin Bowling

 As you progress in your bowling and become more serious about cricket, you'll increasingly recognize the need for well-defined plans and strategies to enhance your performance and achieve consistent results. The journey from youth cricket to the 4th team, and then climbing through the ranks to the first team as a wrist-spin bowler, is undoubtedly challenging—with a steep learning curve at every stage. As a bowler, you must develop resilience. Between being hit for sixes by stronger, more skilled batsmen, you have to quickly put those moments behind you and focus on the positives. It’s at this stage, I imagine, that many young players lose their way and give up on wrist spin, overwhelmed by the psychological demands of the role.

If your club fields multiple teams—from the first XI down to the fourth or fifth—you may find yourself moving between levels, gaining opportunities to compete in different settings. This kind of trial-and-error process is completely normal. Take Adil Rashid in the UK, for example. He’s been part of the England setup for years, having made his international one-day debut as far back as 2009. After a modest start, he faded from the spotlight, which isn’t unusual. It’s widely acknowledged that wrist spinners—like other bowlers—tend to mature with age. With experience comes wisdom: your approach evolves, you become craftier, and being hit for a six affects you less. You learn to internalize setbacks and even draw positives from them. Now 27, Rashid recently featured in a one-day series against Australia and New Zealand with encouraging results. There’s growing speculation that, given the spin-friendly wickets in the upcoming series against Pakistan, he might finally break into the Test side.

At 27, he’s still considered relatively young. Should he fail to seize this opportunity, he may once again recede to the periphery—playing for the England Lions or his county side, Yorkshire. But if he doesn’t make the desired impact in Test cricket this year—if given the chance—it wouldn’t be surprising to see him return later in his career, perhaps in his thirties. Such is the nature of wrist spin: it is arguably the most difficult discipline in cricket, one that takes years, if not decades, to truly master.

Mastering it goes beyond technical skill—it requires a sharp “cricketing brain,” a quality often attributed to legends like Shane Warne. This means constantly thinking about the game: planning, scheming, and working out batsmen.

Working Out the Batsman

In Bob Woolmer’s influential book, The Art and Science of Cricket, an entire chapter in the “Thinking Cricket” section is devoted to this very idea. Woolmer emphasizes the importance of studying batsmen and highlights how Glenn McGrath repeatedly dismissed greats like Sachin Tendulkar and Michael Atherton by targeting subtle technical flaws. As Woolmer explains, even the most gifted batsmen have weaknesses—which may not always be technical but sometimes psychological:

“Be alert to the signs of tension and be willing to dominate him emotionally as well as technically.”

—Bob Woolmer, The Art & Science of Cricket (2008), p. 399

Woolmer also mentions Bill O’Reilly, a firm advocate of keeping detailed notes on every batsman faced—recording new insights meticulously after each match. For years, teams have used pitch maps to identify where batsmen score most of their runs. Today, digital tools and mobile apps have made this process more accessible, allowing players—with the help of a scorer, coach, or support staff—to tilerummy systematically gather and analyze such data.