Off cutter - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

An off cutter is a type of delivery

Delivery (cricket)

A delivery or ball in cricket is a single action of bowling a cricket ball towards the batsman.During play of the game, a member of the fielding team is designated as the bowler, and bowls deliveries towards the batsman...

in the game

Game

A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...

of cricket

Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

. It is bowled

Bowling (cricket)

In the sport of cricket, bowling is the action of propelling the ball toward the wicket defended by a batsman. A player skilled at bowling is called a bowler; a bowler who is also a competent batsman is known as an all-rounder...

by fast bowlers

Fast bowling

Fast bowling, sometimes known as pace bowling, is one of the two main approaches to bowling in the sport of cricket. The other is spin bowling...

.

A bowler releases a normal fast delivery with the wrist locked in position and the first two fingers positioned on top of the cricket ball

Cricket ball

A cricket ball is a hard, solid leather ball used to play cricket. Constructed of cork and leather, a cricket ball is heavily regulated by cricket law at first class level...

, giving it spin about a horizontal axis perpendicular to the length of the pitch

Cricket pitch

In the game of cricket, the cricket pitch consists of the central strip of the cricket field between the wickets - 1 chain or 22 yards long and 10 feet wide. The surface is very flat and normally covered with extremely short grass though this grass is soon removed by wear at the ends of the...

. For an off cutter, a right-handed bowler pulls his fingers down the right side of the ball (from his viewpoint), in an action similar to bowling an off break

Off break

Off break is a type of delivery in the sport of cricket. It is the attacking delivery of an off spin bowler. Off breaks are known as off spinners....

, only at higher speed. This changes the axis of spin to make it more like an off break, which makes the ball deviate to the right when it bounces on the pitch. From a right-handed batsman's point of view, this deviation is to the left, or from the off side towards the leg side

Leg side

The leg side, or on side, is defined to be a particular half of the field used to play the sport of cricket.From the point of view of a right-handed batsman facing the bowler, it is the left hand side of the cricket field...

. This deviation is known as cut, and the delivery is called an off cutter because it moves away from the off side. What differentiates a genuine off cutter from a delivery that simply nips back off the seam is that it is deliberately bowled.

Off cutters do not turn as sharply as off breaks bowled by an off spin

Off spin

Off spin is a type of bowling in the sport of cricket which is bowled by an off spinner, a right-handed spin bowler who uses his or her fingers and/or wrist to spin the ball from a right-handed batsman's off side to the leg side...

bowler, but at the speed of a fast bowler even a tiny deviation can cause difficulties for the batsman. If he is not quick enough to react to the movement, the batsman can miss the ball with his bat and be bowled between bat and pad or out leg before wicket

Leg before wicket

In the sport of cricket, leg before wicket is one of the ways in which a batsman can be dismissed. An umpire will rule a batsman out LBW under a series of circumstances which primarily include the ball striking the batsman's body when it would otherwise have continued on to hit the batsman's...

if struck on the pads.

A fast bowler will typically use the off cutter as a variation ball, as it is most effective when it surprises the batsman. Waqar Younis

Waqar Younis

Waqar Younis Maitla is a former Pakistani right arm fast bowler in cricket and widely regarded as one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time...

, Glenn McGrath

Glenn McGrath

Glenn Donald McGrath AM , nicknamed "Pigeon", is a former Australian cricket player. He is one of the most highly regarded fast-medium pace bowlers in cricketing history, and a leading contributor to Australia's domination of world cricket from the mid-1990s to the early 21st century...

, Richard Hadlee

Richard Hadlee

Sir Richard John Hadlee, MBE is a former New Zealand cricketer who played provincial cricket for Canterbury, Nottinghamshire and Tasmania. He is the son of Walter Hadlee, and the brother of Dayle and Barry Hadlee. His former wife Karen also played international cricket for New Zealand.Hadlee was...

, and Fred Trueman

Fred Trueman

Frederick Sewards Trueman OBE was an English cricketer, generally acknowledged as one of the greatest fast bowlers in history. A bowler of genuinely fast pace who was widely known as Fiery Fred, Trueman played first-class cricket for Yorkshire County Cricket Club from 1949 until he retired in 1968...

managed a bagful of wickets with this delivery because of the accurate lengths at which they operated, between fullish and good lengths (ball landing 2 to 3 steps in front of the batsman) at close to the off stump line. The surprise comes because, when facing rigorously accurate off-side bowlers, like those mentioned above, batters usually incorporate plans to leave the ball , or exaggerate foot movements to the pitch of the ball in anticipation.

The calling card of this delivery, for the batsman to read it in advance, is the typical wobble in the seam after ball release with the seam slanting predominantly towards the batsman. A simple way for a beginner to learn to bowl cutters is to try imparting strong back-spin to the ball by pulling down on the seam at the time of release while keeping the seam vertical.

Cutters work especially well on pitches that are rough (or when the ball lands on cracks on the surface). Such surfaces grip the seam and stop the reverse rotation, leading to considerable deviation as well as the effect of ball keeping low after pitching. In the latter case, the balls are also called 'shooters'. Lance Klusener

Lance Klusener

Lance Klusener is a South African cricketer, more specifically an all-rounder. He is known for his aggressive batting and his fast-medium swing bowling. He is nicknamed "Zulu" because of his fluency in that language. Following his exploits at the 1999 World Cup, he topped the ICC ODI Batting...

used this tactic in matches in the West Indies and the Indian Subcontinent-specially at a match in Calcutta towards the end of his career when he had lost some of his speed.

In test matches, bowlers tend to 'work the cracks' using cutters, meaning that they try pitching the ball on cracks repeatedly with the result that few of the balls that do pitch on cracks unsettles even a well set batsman.

In contemporary cricket, the off-cutter is primarily used as a slower ball in limited over cricket.

See also