Jenner helps the future leg spinners

Terry Jenner's quest for the perfect legbreak may well have been fulfilled seven years ago when Shane Warne flummoxed Mike Gatting with his first delivery in Test cricket in England, but the search for the next great legspinner goes on.

Not that Jenner necessarily believes he's about to stumble over the next Warne. "The really great ones only come along every 20, 30, 40 years. Clarrie Grimmett, Richie Benaud, Shane ... there's a bit of a gap between them. But my job is to encourage those who want to bowl legspin."

It's a job, which now takes Jenner around the world at frequent intervals. Aside from a background as an Australian Test legspinner, Jenner is now best known as Warne's "spin doctor", the man to whom Warne returns when the mechanics, the basics, the action or "the feel" start to seize up.

"There's a four-letter word starting with `F' that Australians use a lot," deadpans Jenner. "`Feel'. The thing is that you've got to feel right about what you're doing, especially if you're bowling legbreaks."

Jenner has been in South Africa for the past couple of weeks putting a host of prospective young legspinners through their paces at Centurion Park. On Friday he had a group of between 15 and 20 walking through their delivery strides.

"If you want to get the basics right, and getting the basics right is the most important thing about coaching, then you've got to slow it down. It makes sense, doesn't it? If you're using a video to look at someone's technique, you slow it down, don't you? You don't try to see what's right or wrong by running at normal speed."

Jenner's pupils on Friday were in the 11-13 age group. "There's a youngster here called Knowledge who was here last year. When I saw him again I said: `I suppose we should call you "Know-all" now.' He said: `No, now I'm "Knowledgeable".'"

For someone with a fairly chequered past, Jenner talks simply and easily to the young hopefuls, speaking at them rather down to them. Over lunch, and a cigar, he expands on a couple of favourite themes: Warne, the general suspicion of all captains towards legspinners - "We're wrist spinners. We're `risk' spinners." - and the importance of "feel".

And, fairly obviously, Paul Adams. For all his work with young players, the United Cricket Board has brought Jenner to South Africa a few times now in an attempt to polish the unorthodox left-armer. Jenner argues that he's never sought to alter Adams' "frog-in-a-blender" action - "The first time I saw him, I thought `How do you start trying to change that'." - but he does say that he's suggested changes of angle to Adams' approach to the crease.

He believes that Adams has already proved himself an effective Test match bowler, and is still a long way from his peak. "If you think how young he was when he started, only a teenager, compared to Shane Paul's got a couple of years and about 60 wickets start. He's still a few years off his best and he'll only get better. I'm not saying he'll be as good as Shane, because Shane's a genius, but he could make a big mark on Test cricket."

No great fan of one-day cricket, Jenner loathes captains and coaches who try to encourage greater accuracy in their spinners by trying to persuade them to spin the ball less.

"That's all they want - dot ball, dot ball, dot ball. But it's about challenging the batsman, inviting him to drive, forcing the mistake and getting wickets. A good spinner challenging a good batsman - that's what it's all about."