Tailender

Tailender is a term used in cricket to describe a batsman who bats right at the end of an innings, at number 10 or 11 in the batting order.

They are usually specialist bowlers (cricketers who only train on bowling to spearhead his teams bowling attack, whilst never practising their batting) so they often get out very easily. They are traditionally liable to be victims of spin bowling and are often trapped leg before wicket (LBW).

In a batting order there are different stages of batsmen. The first two are "opening batsmen", followed by "middle order" and "lower order" batsmen, with the last two being tailenders.

Tailenders rarely score any runs, and so many teams choose to declare if they have a large score, as they know that the tailenders will not make any runs and so they will give themselves more time to attempt to bowl the other team out.

However, some tailenders can be quite good batsmen, but are forced to bat down the order because of better batters up the order. Examples include England's Simon Jones and Australians Brett Lee and Glenn McGrath.