Why is left-arm leg-spinner such a rare breed

Virender Sehwag is one of the best players of spin bowling on the planet. He loves to hit them out of the park, and he usually does it too, with consummate ease. Just occasionally, he can overreach and bring a smile to the bowler’s face, and nobody smiles as broadly as Brad Hogg, who had good reason to grin in this year’s T20 league when he got Sehwag not once but both the times that Rajasthan played Delhi.

He bowled it just a little wider, and made the ball dip just enough to make Sehwag play a shot from a position where he wasn’t that well balanced. When I bumped into Hogg at the JW Marriott in Mumbai, where he was trying his hand at making a tuna salad between matches, I asked him to talk me through how he foxed Sehwag twice within days. But he didn’t rise to the bait. “Sehwag is a cagy customer,” he explained. “He will go away and work on it (if Hogg crows about how he got him).”

So then I asked him the next best question: why aren’t there more bowlers like him? After all, a good wrist spinner who turns the ball a mile is always a threat, whether he bowls with his right arm or left. Most batsmen are right-handed, it’s true, which makes the left-arm leg-spinner’s stock ball turn into them rather than away.

But there’s the googly too, which right-arm leg-spinners use to get left-handers into trouble. Why then the bias against the left-armer?
Hogg didn’t really have an answer, except to offer that it’s a chicken-and-egg thing — kids learn by copying the players they see on TV and there aren’t that many left-arm leg-spinners on view. His own induction to the art was quite by accident.

The day before a Sheffield Shield match, Hogg was turning his arm over at the nets. Those days he had visions of being a Shaun Tait, so he was bombarding his captain Geoff Marsh with bouncers. Finally, the team manager had enough and suggested that it would be more useful if Hogg tried bowling left-arm leg-spin, the reason being that the rival team had a good left-handed leg-spinner they would have to contend with the next day.

Hogg had experimented with leg spin in his backyard and that was about it until then. But it came so naturally to him that the ball started fizzing out of his hand almost immediately, and he could bowl the wrong ‘un too at will. Pretty soon, he was mainly being selected as a spinner and went on to play at the highest level with this unorthodox style of bowling.

The leggie plies a difficult art in the best of times because he’s a wrist-spinner. That makes him a double-edged sword — he’s a potential wicket-taker because of the amount of turn he can get and his well-disguised wrong ‘un, but he can also drag the ball down short or bowl a full toss because it’s hard for him to be as consistently accurate as a finger-spinning off-spinner. And his job has got harder because of the defensive mind-sets of captains conditioned by too many limited overs matches into thinking that they can succeed by simply containing the batsmen.

The captain should know when to leave gaps in the field to tempt the batsmen and when to plug the gaps to create pressure. When the leg-spinner is feeling on top, he would want to bring in a short leg, but for that he needs the captain’s backing. You can imagine that the needs of an unorthodox bowler like Hogg would be even less understood by captains, and Hogg admits he has had his frustrations over the years (although he refuses to name the offenders).

It was a pity Hogg was left out of the Rajasthan playing eleven in the latter half of the tournament. Let’s hope we get to see a bit more of him in the T20 World Cup. This morning, walking through a park, I saw a young wicket-keeper reverse-flick the ball to get a batsman run out, Dhoni style. Who knows, some kid in a park on Sunday morning may copy Hogg’s bowling too and be good enough to become a left-arm leg-spinner for India.