If you have been around junior cricket for any length of time you will have heard a bowler described as side-on or front-on, and you will have heard it decided by looking at their shoulders.

That is the wrong body part.

A bowler’s action type is set at back foot contact, and it is determined by one thing: where the laces of the back foot are pointing. Nothing to do with the top half at all.

The actual definition

Watch the moment the back foot lands on the crease. Look at the laces.

Laces pointing down the pitch, towards the batter — front-on.

Laces pointing across, roughly perpendicular to the pitch — side-on.

Anywhere in between — midway, or semi.

That is the whole classification. It takes one frame of video and five seconds.

All three are legitimate. There is no correct one. There are outstanding international fast bowlers in each category, and trying to convert a bowler from one to another is usually a long, expensive way of making them worse.

Why the shoulders are a trap

Judging action type from the shoulders is not just imprecise. It actively hides the one thing you should be worried about.

The problem to look for is not side-on or front-on. It is when the bottom half and the top half are in different categories. Hips arriving front-on while the shoulders are still side-on, or the reverse. That is a mixed action, and it is the setup most associated with lower back stress injury in young fast bowlers, because it forces the trunk to rotate and bend sideways to reconcile two halves of the body that have made different decisions.

If you assess action type by eyeballing the shoulders, you can only ever see one half of the equation. You will confidently label a bowler side-on, never look at the feet, and miss the mismatch entirely — which is the only part that actually carries a risk.

Check the laces, then check whether the shoulders agree with them. The disagreement is the finding.

What this changes in practice

Two things.

First, it stops a lot of pointless remodelling. A bowler who lands with the laces across the pitch and whose shoulders match is a side-on bowler operating correctly. They do not need to be “opened up” because someone saw a front-on bowler on television. A bowler whose laces point at the batter and whose shoulders match is a front-on bowler and does not need to be turned sideways in the name of tradition. The coaching job in both cases is to make that action work better, not to make it a different action.

Second, it puts the attention on the part of the action where the damage lives. Once you know a bowler’s type from the laces, you have a straightforward question: does everything else line up with it? Hips, shoulders, front foot, arm path. Alignment is a system, and the system is either honest down the target line or it is leaking somewhere.

While you are looking at the feet

Two other things are visible in the same couple of frames and both matter more than the side-on debate.

Where does the front foot point? It should land pointing more or less straight down the pitch — laces at the batter. A front foot that rotates open on landing creates awkward loading through the ankle and knee, and it disrupts the brace and the alignment at the same time.

Are the feet on railway tracks or a tightrope? From directly behind, the back foot and the front foot should land roughly hip-width apart, like two rails. If the front foot steps across so both feet are on the same line, the base is too narrow, the hips cannot rotate freely, and the body compensates late — often sideways. Crossing over is one of the most common faults we see in young bowlers and one of the most fixable.

How to check it tonight

Set a phone up directly behind the bowler, at about stump height, and film two deliveries. Then move square of the crease and film two more from side-on.

Step through the behind-view footage frame by frame and find the moment the back foot lands. Look at the laces. Now you know the bowler’s action type, properly, for the first time.

Three to five frames later the front foot lands. Look at where that foot points, and look at whether the two footmarks are hip-width apart. Then compare the hips and the shoulders: are they in the same category the laces told you, or is the top half doing something different?

That is five minutes of work and it is a more accurate assessment than most young bowlers in this country have ever had.

If you are not sure what you are looking at, send us the footage. Assessing this is precisely what a video trial is for, and it is a great deal cheaper than three years of coaching aimed at a category the bowler was never in.

Ian Pont is Director of Cricket at the National Fast Bowling Academy and has coached fast bowlers at international level.