Spinners argue about grip when the answer is where they land their foot

Two feet of lateral movement at the point of delivery changes the angle into the batter more than any amount of finger work.

Move. It is the least fashionable piece of advice in spin bowling and it is the one that works fastest, because a bowler who delivers from wide of the stumps has changed the geometry of every ball he bowls without altering a single thing about how he bowls it.

Consider what happens to a right-arm off-spinner going wide on the crease against a right-handed batter. The angle across means a ball that grips now finishes on middle and leg rather than sliding down, and the ball that does not grip is a threat to the outside edge instead of a comfortable one to defend. He has manufactured two wicket-taking outcomes from one delivery. From close to the stumps, the same two balls are a leg-side ball and a straight one.

Seam bowlers worked this out long ago and use it constantly, which is why the wide-of-the-crease angle to a left-hander is a standard part of any plan. Spinners, for reasons I have never had explained convincingly, treat their delivery position as fixed and put their energy into varying revolutions, pace and release point. Those are harder skills that take years. Standing eighteen inches further out takes an afternoon.

Part of it is the umpire, and I will grant that. Going wide narrows the angle for a leg before shout and a bowler who lives out there gives up a decision he might otherwise have won. It also cuts down the bowled dismissal. Both are real costs. But they are being weighed against a change that turns a defensive over into an attacking one, and I think the trade is being priced by habit rather than by arithmetic.

The other part is that spin coaching is romantic about the loop and the drift, and moving on the crease feels like a mechanical trick rather than an art. Which is snobbery. Nobody accuses a seamer of cheating for using the width of the crease.

The evidence sits in every match where a spinner has bowled twenty dot balls and cannot work out why the batter looks comfortable. He is comfortable because for twenty deliveries the ball has arrived from exactly the same place. Change the place. Do not change the ball.