What Is a Googly in Cricket? A Batter's Guide to the Wrong One

Every guide to the googly is written for the bowler. Grip it like this, turn the wrist like that, here is the drill. Almost nobody writes the half that matters more often, which is what you do when one is coming at you and you have about half a second to decide. So: what is a googly in cricket, and what should a batter actually do about it?

The short answer

A googly is a delivery bowled by a wrist spinner with a leg-break action but released from the back of the hand, so it spins the opposite way to the stock ball. For a right-arm leg spinner bowling to a right-handed batter, the leg-break moves away towards the off side and the googly comes back in towards the stumps. It is legal, it is not a trick ball, and it is the single most common way wrist spinners get batters bowled or trapped lbw. The off-spinner's version of the same idea is called a doosra, not a googly.

What the ball is doing

A leg spinner spins the ball with the wrist and fingers, not the fingers alone. The stock leg-break leaves the hand with the wrist cocked so the fingers rip across the seam from leg to off. To bowl the wrong one, the bowler rotates the wrist further, until the back of the hand is facing down the pitch at release. Same arm action, same approach, opposite spin.

That gives you the full set:

Leg-break: turns away from a right-handed batter, towards the slips.
Googly: turns in to a right-handed batter, towards the stumps and the pads.
Top-spinner: the in-between ball, little sideways turn, extra dip and bounce.
Flipper: squeezed out with back-spin, skids on low instead of turning.

Flip every direction for a left-handed batter. And note that a left-arm wrist spinner is the mirror image again: their stock ball comes in to a right-hander, so their googly is the one that leaves.

Why it is called that

The delivery was developed by England's Bernard Bosanquet at the turn of the twentieth century, out of a table game he played with a tennis ball. Australians still call it a bosie after him. "Wrong 'un" is the other common name, and it is the most honest one, because the ball is doing the wrong thing on purpose.

How to pick a googly out of the hand

The cues exist, they are just small and they appear in the last stride before release. In rough order of how reliable they are:

The back of the hand. At release, a leg-break shows you the palm or the side of the hand. A googly shows you knuckles. This is the real cue and everything else is a substitute for it.
The seam angle in flight. A leg-break's seam tends to point towards slip or gully. A googly's seam points more towards fine leg or the keeper.
Trajectory. A lot of bowlers float the googly slightly higher and slower, because the wrist position costs them a little pace. If one ball in an over loops more than the rest, be suspicious.
Drift. The leg-break often drifts in towards the pads through the air before turning away. The googly usually drifts less.
The bowler's own tell. A change in the front arm, a different head position, a glance at the pads. Most club bowlers have one. Watch them bowl at somebody else before you bat.

Here is the part the bowling guides skip. At every level below professional, most batters cannot pick a good googly out of the hand, and the ones who say they can are usually picking it off the pitch half a beat later and getting away with it. That is not a failure. It just means your plan cannot depend on reading the hand.

What to do when you cannot pick it

This is the whole game. Ask a club batter what is a googly in cricket and most will give you a decent definition, then get bowled by one on Sunday, because knowing the mechanism is not the same as having a plan. The plan comes down to four decisions.

Play it later. The later you commit, the more information you have. A ball played off the pitch rather than out of the hand gives you an extra fraction of a second in which the ball has already told you which way it is going. Playing late feels passive. It is the opposite, it is the only way to be right.

Play with the spin's worst case. The googly's dismissals are bowled and lbw, and both come from the same error: the batter plays for turn away, leaves a gap between bat and pad, and the ball comes back through it. So defend with the bat and pad close together and the bat in front of the pad. If you close that gap, the googly has to beat you in the air or off the surface rather than through a hole you left open.

Use the crease rather than your feet when in doubt. Coming down the pitch to a wrist spinner is a good shot when you have picked the ball. When you have not picked it, it turns a misread into a stumping. Going back and across costs nothing and buys you time and depth.

Pick which balls to attack. Against wrist spin, length matters more than direction of turn. A short ball and a full ball are attackable whichever way they spin, because you are playing them off the pitch anyway. The good-length ball is the one that punishes a guess. Score off the first two, respect the third, and the googly stops being a wicket-taker and becomes a dot.

If you only remember one thing: the googly does not get you out. Playing for the leg-break gets you out.

In a short format, the maths changes

In a long game you can spend six balls working a spinner out. In a 10 over match you have 60 balls total, and giving a whole over away to a bowler you have not read is a tenth of your innings. That pushes you towards a different approach than the textbook one: back yourself to defend the good-length ball properly rather than sweep or slog at it, and take your runs from the lengths that are not a guess.

The reverse is true when you are bowling. Variation is only worth bowling if the batter has to respect your stock ball first. Three good-length balls, then the surprise, beats six surprises.

Where to practise reading the ball

Reading a delivery late, committing to a decision, and choosing which balls to attack are habits, and habits need repetition against a real opponent who is actively trying to beat you. That is what play cricket online at Howzat Live is built for. It is a free 3D browser game, no download and no install, where you and another real person play a live 1v1 match. One of you bats, the other bowls, and you can talk through the match in chat while it happens. You pick 5, 10 or 20 overs and day or night conditions, then take a quick match against whoever is available or send a private link to a friend.

If you would rather warm up alone first, there are three bots to play against: Gully, Club and Academy. Those results count at half weight, there is a cap of a few per day, and they can carry you no higher than Scale 3. Everything above that has to be earned against real people, which is the correct design, because a bot will not notice that you keep guessing and start punishing it.

Your Scale badge runs from 0 to 10 and appears after five rated matches. Beating stronger opponents moves you up faster, and playing the same opponent over and over is damped, so grinding one friend will not inflate you. You can see where everybody sits on the leaderboard.

So the full answer to what is a googly in cricket is two answers. It is a leg spinner's wrong one, released from the back of the hand and turning the opposite way to the stock ball. And it is a test of whether you play late enough to let the pitch tell you the truth before you commit.

Create a free account and play a match tonight, or read the rest of the blog for more on bowling, fields and format tactics.