Cricket
Ntini SA's 'secret weapon'
2008-12-02 20:25
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Altus Momberg
Cape Town - South Africa’s own 'secret weapon' in the upcoming cricket Test series against Australia is a bowler who already has 369 Test wickets to his credit. Indeed - The Makhaya Ntini facing the Aussies later this month is not the same Ntini against whom they played in the past.
Ntini’s performance has lacked fire over the past year or so, but his new willingness to bowl around the wicket means that South Africa has a completely new weapon in its bowling arsenal.
Caused problems
The Protea bowlers battled against the left-handed batsmen in the series against England earlier this year. The two openers especially, Alastair Cook and Andrew Strauss, caused some problems.
The Aussies also have three top order left-handed batsmen in Matthew Hayden, Simon Kattich and Michael Hussey who aim to get in South Africa’s way.
However, in the recent series against Bangladesh, Ntini showed that he has the ability to move the ball away from the left-handers, even if it means bowling around the wicket. Bangladesh might be one of the weakest Test teams, but Ntini managed to beat the outside edge of the bat more often than not, and one had an idea that if he bowled against better batsmen, he would have had even more success.
It almost seemed as if the Bangladesh batsmen just weren’t good enough to get the edge!
'More upright'
The Proteas’ assistant coach, Vincent Barnes, said they worked very hard on getting Ntini to bowl around the wicket.
“We started the process in England. After the tour we asked Makhaya to work on bowling around the wicket when he was with the Warriors, and it is clear that he has worked really hard at it,” Barnes said.
He said that because Ntini bowled so well around the wicket that he would try and get him to do the same when bowling to right-handed batsmen.
“He is much more upright when he bowls around the wicket and doesn’t fall to the left (as he does when bowling over the wicket). If he’s more upright, he bowls quicker and gets more bounce from the pitch.
“I have split the image on a computer screen to show him how he looks when bowling around the wicket and when he bowls over the wicket. Hopefully we can fine-tune it before the series against the Aussies,” Barnes said.