A LETHAL COCKTAILWith the speed I can bowl [Mills clocked 93mph in the 2016/17 Big Bash], the pace and slower deliveries marry together quite nicely. The faster you bowl at a batsman, the more they have to set themselves for that pace. So if you can then alter that pace significantly that can be very effective.I’m quite lucky with my action in terms of the angles of my arm and my arm speed. I can bowl my back-of-the-hand slower delivery with the same arm speed, whereas with some guys their arm speed is a bit slower, or they have to drop their arm a bit, or you can see them cock their wrist. It’s the luck of the draw, but for whatever reason my body allows me to still get my arm through fast, which makes it harder for the batters to pick my slower ball.TOP TIP: MAINTAIN YOUR ARM SPEEDMy biggest piece of advice is to try and bowl your slower ball as fast as you can so the arm speed is the same. That gives you energy and more revs on the ball so that when it pitches it kicks and gets that little bit of bounce which often makes the batsman either miss it or miss-hit it.You’ve got to try and identify what the batsman’s doing. I used to kind of just run up and bowl and see what happened but the more I play now I’m reading the batters a bit better and reading the game better too – looking at boundary sizes, where the batsman is looking to hit me and trying to keep it out of their scoring zones.During the PSL, the Karachi opener Shahzaib Hasan was swinging pretty hard in the powerplay and managed to get me away for a couple of fours. I anticipated he was going to coming at me again, and they were all pace-on deliveries that I had been bowling, so the next ball I came around the wicket and bowled him a slower ball. He hit it straight up in the air and I got a caught and bowled.
