Left is right

Akash Chopra once again with his highly informative column, this time talks about facing left arm bowlers.

But as soon as the ball starts swinging in to the right-hander, in the air and off the surface, a host of new possibilities open up. As a batsman your first instinct is to get the pad out of the way, because the leg-before is a left-arm swing bowler's bread-and-butter dismissal. So you tend to play inside the line, and sometimes even with a short forward stride to ensure that you play with the bat.

It's easier to go a lot more forward, and probably outside the line, to a right-arm inswing bowler, but you can't do that with a left-armer for two reasons. One, since you're standing with your stance open, it's almost impossible to go that far across, and second, and more importantly, the natural swing tends to finish within the stumps because of the angle the ball is bowled from. A right-arm inswing bowler tends to bowl from wider of the crease and the angle takes the ball down the leg stump, but that's not the case with the left-arm bowler.

The toughest part of facing a left-armer is when the ball is swinging in the air and off the surface. This allows the bowler to pitch it way outside the off stump. Sometimes it shapes back in and on other occasions it just holds its line. Both can be dangerous. Under normal circumstances, if the ball is pitched way outside off stump it doesn't come in enough after pitching to be lethal. It's a fine line, though. An inch to one side is too much, and an inch to the other puts it in the danger zone. We saw the batsmen feeling for the ball a lot in the last two Tests. It wasn't because they couldn't judge the line; it was more because they were worried about these crucial inches.

If all this isn't complicated enough, there's more in the left-arm seamer's armoury. Once the ball gets a little old, he can come around the stumps and cause problems of a different sort. The law that says "the ball doesn't come in if it pitches this far outside the off stump" doesn't hold true anymore because of the point of delivery. The natural angle takes the ball into the batsman. So even if it doesn't really swing, the angle is enough to put doubts in the batsman's mind

http://content-www.cricinfo.com/columns/content/current/story/305838.html