Glenn Phillips elaborates on batting left-handed, says that the switch is something that is in for the future.
‘It’s more of a future thing’ – why Glenn Phillips bats left-handed.
Glenn Phillips occasionally forgets that he is right-handed to the point where, two days before New Year’s, he took strike the wrong way around and hit the ball for six over midwick—wait, it had already reached cover by then. This is similar to how he forgets he is a man and cannot fly.
Phillips has a reputation for being unconventional. In order to obtain a head start without being exposed to a run-out backing up, he once went full sprinter at the starting line at the non-strikers’ end of the 2022 T20 World Cup, knees bent, head down, one hand touching the turf. Before leaving for the white-ball tour of India in January, he told NZC that his most recent trick had been “a couple of years” in the making.
“I do enjoy my left-handed batting training,” Phillips said. “Obviously, I do it for multiple reasons. One, just to keep both hands and both sides of the brain working, but also just for the opportunity to, I guess, take down left-arm spin at some stage.”
Since a large percentage of hitters at all levels of cricket are right-handed, clubs prioritise a left-arm orthodox spinner since the ball turning away from a batter is seen as a positive match-up in Twenty20 cricket. However, Phillips’ victory over Jayden Lennox last Tuesday is not going to be the beginning of anything just yet.
“It’s more of a future thing,” he said, “But for the opportunity to come in a game where there’s going to be a lot of left-arm off-spin bowling, I guess it sort of made sense to give it a go and bring it back to the forefront of the training leading into that game. And the fact that the opportunity came during the game to use it was quite good.”