Graeme Swann loves dismissing left-hand batsmen
We dare say Graeme Swann quite likes dismissing right-hand batsmen as well, but he doesn’t do it half as often.
Of his six wickets in this match, only one was right-handed – Jerome Taylor. This is by no means unusual for Swann. Against right-handers he looks an everyday bowler. Against left-handers, he bowls one ball to size them up and then dismisses them with the second ball.
Good. Test cricket’s long been sullied with more than its fair share of cack-handers; weaselling around, stinking up the place with their sickening wrong-handedness.
It’s almost like they don’t know it’s a genetic flaw. It’s like they think they’re as good as normal people. We’ve even heard rumours that at some grounds they’re allowed to use the same changing rooms as the right-handed players.
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"It’s not that I’m lazy - it’s that I just don’t care"
he’s not a bad bowler actually. to me he actually looks better bowling over the wicket to righties, but obviously around to lefties has been pretty effective. interested to see whether that straight-on ball is a fluke or not (I have seen it a few times from him).
isn’t it entirely possible that swann got some kinda ill treatment from some left hander some way back in his teens or something?!
i think it is worthy to be found out, which if any of his past girlfriends was a left hander, and what was the treatment meted out to him!
Man I’d kill for any kind of hand treatment by a girl.
(excluding anyone related to Rob Key)
For someone who is enormous, e normous, you’ve got a strange antipathy towards his Robness. Are you worried that the Keyster’s keister is better than your own?
When I think of left handers, I always remember that statistically, they live five years less than us normal people.
Knowing that Matthew Hayden is a cackhanded meathead makes this a very nice thing too.
As a sometime offspinner myself (”sometime” because they rarely turn) I can tell you that left-handers are much easier to bowl to.
If I could I would choose to play against a team entirely made up of left-handers, but I wouldn’t drink with them in the bar afterwards. Devil’s Children.
Spinners get more wickets when the ball is moving away from the batsman, because the batsman is trapped between possibly edging (if it spins) and possibly lbw (if it doesn’t). With the ball coming in at you, a pad outside the line of off stump neutralises almost every way of getting out.
The more attacking option for the off-spinner, which is to pitch the ball around off stump (making lbw more likely), can be relatively safely swept, as the batsman is playing with the spin. For this reason, captains have traditionally told their Swannish bowlers to keep to a line outside off stump, turning them into nothing more than cricket’s Imodium (doesn’t fix the problem, but temporarily stops the runs).
This is why leggies and left-arm orthodox bowlers have always appeared to be the more attacking option – they have more suitable targets (i.e. right-handed batsmen). Against a team like the West Indies, with a disproportionate number of left-handed batsmen, it is the right arm off-spinner that ought to be the best bet.
(Note that none of the above applies to Sri Lankan bowlers.)