If you have any pride in your left arm seam bowling, you need to bowl at the death in your cricket matches.

As a left armer, you have all the tools open to you of a righty, plus an extra one that makes you perfect for closing out a game. But it does require a great deal of skill.

Are you up for the challenge and chance to be the hero?

The wide yorker

Your weapon of difference is the wide yorker.

Deliver this ball into a small slot just inside the wide line and just in front of the popping crease (10cm or so).

This works because when you hit your yorker, you have cut off the leg side. You can pack the off side and keep the runs to a minimum. Against batsmen who go to leg at the death - most club and school cricket players - you will see increased frustration and more wickets from silly shots.

Wide yorker: yellow line

Practice your skills

Of course, you need to work on hitting this small target. Get it wrong and you will see the dreaded wide signalled.

Practice the ball often. Ideally against real batsmen as you can gauge how they react to it. However, you can bowl at cones, shoes or PitchVision as well.

If you feel you are making progress - about a 25% success rate is a good point - you can start to increase the difficulty by adding more variations.

Many left arm bowlers find it difficult to choose the right option for the right moment. As a result, their variety is often their biggest weakness. They have not worked out what to bowl and when to bowl it.

So practice this too.

For example, you might want a range of balls to bowl at a newer batsman while sticking to your wide yorker to get a set hitter off strike.

To increase your skill in this area, set a cone straight in front of the stumps 5 to 10cms in front of the popping crease and a cone on the same length just inside the off side wide line.

Hit the wide cone with every ball unless given a signal. As you run up, have a coach or team mate occasionally shout for you to hit the straight cone. If you get good at that, you can also add length balls and bouncers to the options.

Track your progress with PitchVision.

This way you are developing skills in a range of areas with your unique left arm twist. Captains will be begging for your cricket talents in no time!

How many times has a left arm seamer been picked because they offer “variety” to a cricket team?

In a world dominated by right-arm over medium pace bowlers, the promise of a different angle to batsmen is too tempting for selectors. And it works. Many batsmen find it hard to adapt to the change of angle. The left arm bowler gets more wickets.

It’s exactly this reason - creating problems for batsmen - that means any variety will help your team. Here are a few more ways.

Always pick a spinner

There are plenty of excuses not to pick a spinner. Maybe you don’t have any good ones in your club. Maybe the pitch is green. It doesn’t matter; you always have a spinner.

This is because batsmen who play spin well are rare. Even an average spinner causes problems simply by the fact there is less pace on the ball. Tail-enders especially can’t resist. Even if the ball does not turn an inch, there is still flight, dip, drift and variations of pace. Combine that with left arm spin and you are looking at a hero for all conditions.

Yes, there is a risk to blindly playing a spinner. You may be left with three seamers to do most of the work if your spinner does nothing. Yet, without that variety you will always be left wondering if you could have done more.

Get out of the corridor

Whatever arm or pace the bowlers use, you can offer variety through changes like going around the wicket, bowling yorkers and slower balls or just setting unusual fields: Anything that gets the batter out of their rhythm for a little while.

It may not work but as the saying goes;  if you do what you always did, you get what you always got.

Of course, you might be confident enough with the skill of your reliable right arm over pitch it up medium pace bowlers to never worry. I'm willing to bet there are times when that extra effort was worth the risk. You can always find something to to do.

Change the bowling

Which brings us onto the last tip: If nothing is happening, change the bowling.

Give your main bowlers time to get a batsmen out, especially your spinners, but you also need to get that feel for when the batsmen are finding it easy: scoring runs without looking like getting out.

That is the time to switch to another bowler.

Keep spells short to confuse the batsman as much as you can. You can even swap ends with bowlers. The change might just be enough variety. 

At club and school level you have to work with what you have. But even if you just have three right arm seamers and an occasional slow bowler you can create variety. It's not an exact science (it wouldn't be as much fun if it was) so get creative and never stop thinking when you cross that white line. You never know what might work.