The Googly in Cricket — What It Is, How It Works and Who Bowls It

What Is a Googly?

A googly (also called a 'wrong 'un' or 'bosie') is a delivery bowled by a leg-spin bowler that spins the opposite direction to the standard leg-break. While a leg-break turns from leg side to off side for a right-handed batter, the googly turns from off to leg — like an off-break — while appearing to come from the same action as a leg-break. This disguise is the googly's key weapon: a batter playing for the turn away finds the ball cutting back into their pads or stumps instead.

How the Googly Is Bowled

The googly is delivered with the wrist rotating in the opposite direction to the leg-break at the point of release. Instead of the seam rotating toward fine leg (as in the leg-break), the seam rotates toward slip, imparting off-break-like spin despite the right-arm action. The difficulty of the googly is that it requires the bowler to 'bowl against the wrist,' which reduces control and makes it harder to land on a consistent length. Many leg-spinners develop the googly late in their careers or choose not to bowl it regularly because of the control cost.

Greatest Googly Bowlers

Abdul Qadir of Pakistan was famous for his devastating googly in the 1980s. Shane Warne used his sparingly to devastating effect, delivering it to batters who had settled into playing his leg-break. Rashid Khan (Afghanistan) has one of the best googlies in modern cricket, concealing it so well that even experienced T20 batters struggle to read it from his hand. Yuzvendra Chahal (India) and Adil Rashid (England) are other prominent googly bowlers in the current game.

Reading the Googly

Experienced batters try to read the googly from the bowler's wrist and hand position at the point of release — a correctly concealed googly looks identical to a leg-break until the ball pitches. Watching the seam angle in flight and the way the ball comes out of the hand are the traditional indicators. Modern batters in franchise cricket use scouting video heavily and may even practice facing a specific bowler's googly before a game, but the best googlies still deceive at the highest level.