Googly Explained: The Leg-Spinner's Secret Weapon
The googly is a delivery bowled with a leg-spin action that turns the opposite way — into a right-handed batter rather than away from them. It has deceived the world's best batters for over a century.
What is a googly?
A googly (also called a 'wrong 'un') is a delivery bowled by a wrist-spin (leg-spin) bowler that turns in the opposite direction to the standard leg break. Against a right-handed batter: a leg break pitches and spins away to the off side (from leg to off); a googly pitches and spins from off to leg — into the right-hander's body, towards the stumps from the off side. The delivery is disguised to look like a leg break in the hand and through the air, making it one of cricket's most difficult balls to 'read'.
How is a googly bowled?
A leg-break is released with the wrist rotating from right to left (for a right-arm bowler), imparting top-spin that causes the ball to veer away from a right-hander. The googly inverts this: the wrist rolls from left to right at the point of release, with the back of the hand facing the batter rather than the palm. This reverses the spin axis, causing the ball to turn the other way. The challenge is concealing this wrist position from the batter, since any visible change in hand or wrist action telegraphs the variation.
Identifying a googly
Advanced batters look for the 'seam position' in flight — a googly often shows the seam rotating in a slightly different plane to the leg break — and for the position of the bowler's wrist and knuckles at the point of release. Some bowlers are particularly difficult to read because their action is so similar for both deliveries. Shane Warne was so threatening not because his googly was unreadable, but because batters knew his leg break was devastating — the threat of the googly created doubt even when he did not bowl it. Anil Kumble, by contrast, relied more on the top-spinner and flipper, while Rashid Khan's googly is widely regarded as the most dangerous in modern cricket.
Frequently asked questions
Is the doosra the same as a googly?
No. The doosra is bowled by an off-spin (finger-spin) bowler and turns the opposite way to an off break. The googly is bowled by a leg-spin (wrist-spin) bowler and turns the opposite way to a leg break. Both are 'opposite-direction' deliveries, but they come from completely different bowling actions.
Who bowls the best googly in cricket today?
Rashid Khan of Afghanistan is widely rated as having the most deceptive and effective googly in modern international cricket. Yuzvendra Chahal and Adam Zampa are also noted for excellent googlies.