The evolution of bowling in cricket

In the first 1993 Benson and Hedges Cup final between the West Indies and Australia, Curtly Ambrose, a fearsome fast bowler - known for his sheer speed - surprisingly bowled a slower ball to Ian Healy. The Australian batter went through with his shot early and missed the ball to get cleaned up. 

Both Ambrose and Healy saw the funny side of it. Every player at the Sydney Cricket Ground was laughing. No one expected someone like Ambrose to bowl a slower ball.

About three decades later, a pace bowler in India - Harshal Patel - said, "There is nothing wrong with bowling 24 slower balls in a four-over T20 spell."

This pretty much sums up the evolution of fast bowling over the last few decades. Fast bowlers used to just run in and bowl as fast as they could before, but not anymore. With the introduction and popularisation of T20, pacers are not afraid of using some variation and bowl off-pace deliveries to deceive the batters. 

The change of pace is often hard for the batters to pick. For example, in the 2023 Asia Cup, India fast bowler Prasidh Krishna followed a 145-kph delivery with a 95-kph slower delivery. The batter on strike - Nasum Ahmed - was bamboozled and was bowled off the slower ball.

Krishna rolled his fingers across the seam to deceive the batter. But it's not the only type of slower ball now. In the same match, debutant Tanzim Hasan Sakib nailed two slower balls out of the back of the hand, a kind of slower first extensively used by England's Jade Dernbach.

In his prime, Mustafizur Rahman could bowl faster cutters and slower cutters without changing the grip and action. There are two types of cutters - leg-cutters and off-cutters. The cutters are basically bowled by fast bowlers but the balls delivered behave like the ones bowled by spinners. That means an off-cutter is basically an off-break and a leg-cutter is a leg-break, bowled by a fast bowler. 

Another popular form of slower ball is the knuckleball, borrowed by cricket from baseball. There is no rotation of seam and no pace to work with for the batters. So the batters often are foxed and play shots before the ball reaches them. South Africa's Charl Langeveldt was one of the first exponents of the knuckleball and it was used invariably at the death by India's Zaheer Khan in the 2011 World Cup.

It will be wrong to think that the slower balls are used only in white-ball cricket. 

England's Jofra Archer used the knuckleball to great effect in the 2019 Ashes. A year before that, Jasprit Bumrah famously bowled a slower yorker to dismiss Australia's Shaun Marsh.

So has upright swing and seam bowling gone out of fashion? No, but it has evolved as well. England great Stuart Broad picked up a wicket in the last ball of his Test career with a wobble-seam delivery. 

In this, the seam of the ball wobbles from side to side and the bowler himself doesn't know which way the ball will deviate after pitching because of the unpredictability of landing. Many credit James Anderson for inventing the ball, but he himself said he learnt it from Mohammad Asif, during Pakistan's fateful tour of England in 2010.

One simply cannot skip Saqlain Mushtaq while talking about bowling variations. Although he didn't develop it, Mushtaq made the "doosra" (the second one) - that turned in the opposite direction of off-break - popular. 

The doosra is not used much now because many bowlers have to hyperextend their arms for that which is deemed illegal. 

But that didn't stop off-spinners from turning the ball the other way. Sri Lanka's Ajantha Mendis reinvented the ball, many years after Australia's Jack Iverson first used it. India's Ravichandran Ashwin has been using it to great effect and in the process invented another version of it - the reverse carrom ball - that comes in to the right-hander. It has been mastered by Mendis' compatriot Maheesh Theekshana as well.

Mushtaq taught another variation to the finger-spinners when he was Bangladesh's spin-bowling coach. The undercutter, which keeps low after pitching and skids towards the batters, is now often used by some Bangladeshi bowlers - Shakib Al Hasan, Mehidy Hasan Miraz and Mahedi Hasan. Ashwin, again, is a master of this.

The arm ball is another lethal weapon for a left-arm finger spinner. It follows the direction of the arm and often catches batters by surprise. Once New Zealand great Daniel Vettori expressed his desire to learn the arm ball from Bangladesh's Mohammad Rafique. His successor Shakib now uses it extensively. 

Now in T20s, we often see spinners looking to swing the ball rather than turn it. It's an excellent way to bowl defensively in this format, making the bowler difficult to be taken on. The likes of Mujeeb-ur-Rahman, Imad Wasim, Akeal Hosein who regularly open the bowling do that very often.

Even the leg-spinners who have a lot of variations generally up their sleeves are adding new weapons to their armoury so that the batters can't pick them out of their hands. 

Batting has evolved so much over the years and now batters show more intent, take more chances and have become more skillful as well. To combat that, bowlers are evolving as well and that is adding to the beauty of the game.