Leg spin

The bowlers with the second- and fourth-highest number of wickets in the history of Test cricket, Shane Warne and Anil Kumble, respectively, were leg spinners.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was thought that leg spin would disappear from the game due to the success of West Indian, and later Australian teams, exclusively using fast bowlers.

During this time Abdul Qadir of Pakistan was the highest-profile leg spinner in the world and is sometimes credited with "keeping the art alive".

[3][4] However, leg spin has again become popular with cricket fans and a successful part of cricket teams, driven largely by the success of Shane Warne, beginning with his spectacular Ball of the Century to Mike Gatting in 1993.

While very difficult to bowl accurately, good leg spin is considered one of the most threatening types of bowling to bat against for a right-handed batter, since the flight and sharp turn make the ball's movement extremely hard to read, and the turn away from the right-handed batter is more dangerous than the turn into the right-handed batter generated by an off spinner.

[29] A leg break is bowled by holding the cricket ball in the palm of the hand with the seam running across under all the fingers.

Players listed below have been included as they meet specific criteria which the general cricketing public would recognise as having achieved significant success in the art of leg spin bowling.

Highly skilled leg spin bowlers are also able to bowl deliveries that behave unexpectedly, including the googly, which turns the opposite way to a normal leg break and the topspinner, which does not turn but dips sharply and bounces higher than other deliveries.

A few leg spinners such as Abdul Qadir, Anil Kumble, Shane Warne and Mushtaq Ahmed have also mastered the flipper, a delivery that like a topspinner goes straight on landing, but floats through the air before skidding and keeping low, often dismissing batters leg before wicket or bowled.