by Paul Ford - Republished from Outright 53 (Autumn 2023)
On Wednesday afternoons the dulcet tones of Jason Hoyte, educated thoughts of Dylan Cleaver, and some nonsense from me collide on The BYC Podcast. It is always encouraging to get correspondence from Kiwi cricket fans around the globe and recently that included this hawk-eyed piece of cricket nerdery from a guy called Matt: “Mark Chapman was signing autographs with his right hand, but obviously bowls and bats left-handed. Intriguingly he is a mirror image of Kane Williamson, and a bloke called Tendulkar - who both write left-handed and bat right. Quite some company to be in!"
Our correspondent reckoned the theory was that being ambidextrous was an advantage for a batter, all to do with balancing the eyes and similar reaction times in both brain halves or something like that.
I thought I’d dig into this ambidexterity a bit, and what a rich little vein of obscurity it proved to be. For starters if you bat and bowl with the same hand like Kane and Sachin and Mark, are you actually an ambidextrous cricketer? Not really: you’re basically entry level if all you do with the other hand is sign autographs and play table tennis.
The next level up is where you bat right-handed but bowl left-handed. There is a veritable galaxy of cricketers with this penchant, including our very own Sir Richard Hadlee, Jimmy Neesham, Ben Stokes and Jacob Oram (bat left/bowl right) and then vice versa like Ashley Giles, Michael Clarke and Trent Boult (bat right/bowl left).
The late Phillip Hughes batted, bowled, and fielded left-handed until he succumbed to a shoulder injury which saw him field and bowl with his right side, and current Australian selector George Bailey did the opposite.
But what about those players who are truly ambidextrous and bat both right-handed and left-handed? This precocious talent is sighted increasingly often as batters become accustomed to taking on the risk to pierce orthodox fields with switch-hits.
Kevin Pietersen famously dabbled in double-handing as he brought some of his childhood BYC experience to the international stage: “If you were out for a golden duck you had to face six balls left-handed and, if you got out again, you were out for good. So I needed to become good at this.”
The Aussies love a two-handed fairytale too. Michael Hussey is right-hand dominant but learned to bat left-handed to emulate his childhood idol, the ‘Grit King’ Allan Border, a decision Mr Cricket made watching the Boxing Day Test when he was about six.
And at the apex of ambidexterity are the most advanced cricketers in the universe - those freaks who can bowl right-handed and left-handed with aplomb. As Tim Wigmore put it: “Ambidextrous bowling is an extraordinary challenge. It is far more demanding than switch-hitting because it involves rewiring the entire body.”
The most recent party trick along these lines that I have seen was Australian Jemma Barsby who bowled right-arm and then left-arm spin in the WBBL to Elyse Villani and Meg Lanning in the same over. She explained that her dexterity was also born in the backyard as she got tired of “getting smashed” by her brother with her right arm.
Other exponents included Hashan Tillakaratne who bowled left and right-handed spin for Sri Lanka, Graham Gooch in meandering fixtures, and double-laser arm Ian ‘Freak’ Harvey. Keep an eye out for Tasmanian 21-year-old, Nivethan Radhakrishnan too - he bowls finger spin with both hands and has had a taste of first-class cricket and net bowling in the IPL.
But what of correspondent Matt’s vague theory about the science behind any or all of this? Well at least one study found that batters can unearth a significant advantage if they bat with the “wrong” hand.
The academics found that using a reversed stance with the dominant hand at the top rather than the bottom of their batting grip provided a clear technical advantage. The top hand has the greatest dexterity and provides more control over guiding the willow into the ball’s path.
The research also found that players have a preference to rely more on the visual input from one eye over the other. Using the reversed stance increases the likelihood that the dominant eye is the ‘front’ eye when batting, and this means an improved view of the ball.
I’d tell you all about the bowling science too, but I couldn’t find anything official. But there was confirmation everywhere I looked that it was incredibly difficult - just like most of cricket for normal people.
Paul Ford is one-third of The BYC Podcast and a co-founder of the Beige Brigade. He describes his cricket as ambisinistrous - the opposite of ambidextrous - and meaning ‘no good with either hand’.