The Outswinger and the Inswinger
Swing has a direction, and the bowler chooses it. The trick is that the two choices look almost identical leaving the hand — which is the whole point.
By The Cricket Daily Desk · 6 min read
In the last part we found the rule: a ball swings toward the side its seam is pointing. That single fact hands the bowler a choice most spectators never notice him making. Angle the seam one way and the ball curves away from the batter. Angle it the other way and it curves in. Same grip family, same run-up, same arm — two deliveries that end up in completely different places. Learning to bowl both, and to hide which is which, is most of the art of swing bowling.
One rule underneath both: hold the seam still
Before the two directions, the thing they share. Whatever a swing bowler is trying to do, the seam has to arrive at the batter still pointing where he aimed it — upright and steady, not wobbling. He manages that with backspin: the ball is released spinning backwards along the line of the seam, so it behaves like a gyroscope and holds its angle the whole way down. Scatter the seam and the ball won't swing at all — and you'll scuff it useless in the process. This is the practical face of the wind-tunnel ideal from Part 3: the strongest swing comes from a seam held at roughly twenty degrees, spinning cleanly.
With that in hand, the two deliveries are just two seam angles.
The outswinger — the one that takes the edge
The outswinger starts on a line at the batter and curves away from him, toward the slip fielders waiting behind the off side. It is the prized wicket-taking ball, because it tempts the batter to reach for it and then leaves him — the edge flying to the wicketkeeper or slips.
To bowl it, the bowler lays his first two fingers close together either side of the seam, keeps the seam vertical but angled toward the slips, and holds the polished side facing in toward the batter's legs so that leading face stays smooth. The wrist stays relatively relaxed, almost falling behind the fingers. Everything is arranged so the seam points at the slips — and, per Part 3, the ball follows the seam, away.
The inswinger — the one that's dangerous straight
The inswinger is the mirror image: it starts around off stump or outside it and curves back in, toward the pads and the stumps. Its threat is different. Because it comes into the batter's body, an edge tends to thud into the pad or the hip rather than fly to slip — so the inswinger rarely takes the catching edge. What it does instead is beat the bat on the inside, or trap the front pad in front of the stumps for leg-before, or, in its most feared form, arrive as a full, late-swerving yorker that ducks in under the bat and crashes into the base of the stumps.
The grip shifts a little. The fingers move slightly across the seam so it angles toward leg slip, the ball rests on the pad of the thumb — which locks the wrist cocked and inclined to the leg side — and the polished side now faces the off side. The bowling arm comes through closer to vertical, brushing the ear. Seam pointing to leg, ball follows the seam, in.
Why they're used so differently
It's worth pausing on the tactical asymmetry, because it explains a lot of what you see. A right-hander is more often out to the outswinger — it draws the bat away from the body, where an edge carries. The inswinger is more often a containing and straight threat: the lbw shout, the bowled-through-the-gate, the yorker. Good bowlers pair them. Beat a batter's outside edge a few times with the away-swinger, watch him start covering that line — then bring one back in through the gap he's just opened.
The disguise — where the craft really lives
Here is the part that makes swing bowling an art rather than a knack. Look again at those two set-ups: the differences are almost entirely in the hand — the grip angle, the thumb, the wrist. The run-up doesn't change. The leap doesn't change. The arc of the arm barely changes. Biomechanists who measured elite bowlers found they use much the same arm-joint action for both; what differs is mostly the grip angle and the twist of the forearm and wrist at the moment of release.
The run-up doesn't change and the arm barely changes. The only tell is the wrist — the last thing to move, and the hardest thing to see.
That is exactly what lets a great bowler hide the delivery. If the only tell is the wrist, and the wrist is the last thing to move and the hardest thing to see, the batter gets no warning from the approach. He has to read the ball out of the hand, in a fraction of a second, and if he reads it wrong he has committed to a shot for a ball that is going somewhere else. Coaches teach the wrist positions with an old drill — imagining a pole planted at the crease and bringing the bowling arm around one side of it for the outswinger, the other side for the inswinger — a drill popularised by the coach Bob Woolmer. However it's taught, the goal is the same: two balls that leave the hand looking like one.
So the same action really does make two opposite balls, and the best bowlers make sure you can't tell which until it's too late. Which brings us to the one thing every swing bowler will tell you helps most — and it isn't in the grip at all. It's the weather. That belief is almost universal, and, as the next part shows, it is almost entirely wrong.