The ball that captures the devastating essence of the slower ball in this era is arguably not the slower ball itself. But Josh Hazlewood’s fake slower ball — the bluff of a bluff.
The variety is beguiling: the door-knobbed floaters of Jasprit Bumrah; the knuckled stingers of Bhuvneshwar Kumar; the devil-fingered dippers of Lungi Ngidi; the spongy-bounced cheats from the back of Ashok Sharma’s palms. The origin stories are many, like medieval myths, but the most verified involves a strapping quick from Barbados, fatigue and a Eureka moment.
In the early 80s, when West Indies cricket was at its peak, Franklyn Stephenson, an ambitious fast bowler from a quiet parish in Barbados packed his bags to the Lancashire leagues, dreaming of playing for West Indies one day. But Lancashire was not what he’d imagined. “I had to make money,” he tells The Indian Express. “For that I had to play as many games as possible.” Weekend, weekday — it didn’t matter. “Then, I got tired,” he says with a shrill chuckle.
When tiredness crept in, he resorted to off-spin at times. “But I got hit. As any fast bowler worth his salt would say, I hated getting hit. With the same action, I slipped in a faster ball when bowling off-breaks. It surprised batsmen, and that is when the scope of mixing up the pace hit me,” he says. Caribbean fast bowlers were taught to bowl fast. Pace reduction was blasphemy. Andy Roberts was blunter: “I didn’t bowl a slow bouncer. I had only two varieties — the fast bouncer and a faster bouncer.”
One evening in the nets, he decided to invert the trick: bowl a slower one when he was bowling fast. No one would teach him, because no one knew it. “I decided to bowl the slower ball with an off-spinner’s grip, with the same long run-up and arm-speed. It worked,” he says.
It stopped working too. “Batsmen started reading it from the grip, because my run-up was such that the batsmen could see my grip,” he said. In his pursuit of disguise, he found a rare, natural gift. “I could change the grip during my run-up. When I ran in, I held the ball like I would normally — index and middle finger slightly apart but still on the seam. The batsman had a full view of the ball. Just before the leap, I slipped my index finger down and tweaked the ball with middle and index fingers, like an off-spinner,” he says. The ball came out of the tips of his fingers.
The theatrics of the ball stunned him. It rose higher from his palms than the seam-up ones, before dropping viciously late on the batsmen. “Seeing the initial trajectory, most batsmen ducked thinking it was a beamer. To their shock, they find the stumps shattered or the ball hitting the pads,” he says. A Sky Sports director christened it the Moonball.
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He tried teaching the technique to some of the young bowlers from his country. “Even Jofra, but he said he simply couldn’t. Each one should do what he is comfortable with. For example, Courtney had a different technique — he let the ball roll along his palms without clicking his wrists,” he points out.
He ran in like a locomotive, and released like a whiplash. The incongruous motions were designed for the bouncer. He had a fiendish one too. They came in full gear to repel his short ball. Then they left befuddled with the ones that barely landed or bounced. “It’s the simple theory: the faster you are, the better your slower ball would be,” he says.
The caveat, though, is disguise. He used to operate upwards of 140 kph and drop the pace to less than 100 kph, but without decipherable alterations in action or arm-speed, and with a command of lengths. “Lengths are important, again because the batsman can’t size you up. The slower balls behave differently when bowled at different lengths,” he says. The fuller ones swerved and dipped; those of a good length spun. “Sometimes like an off-break,” he says. A slower ball to Brian Hardie in the Benson and Hedges final in 1989 spun almost a foot from outside the off-stump to hit the off pole.
In some instances he had to tell the bewildered batsman to see the distorted stumps. “I bowled one to Mike Gatting. He had ducked thinking it was a bouncer, his eyes towards gully. It hit his back leg and was given lbw,” he says. Derbyshire all-rounder Alan Warner once ducked and turned around to watch Stephenson celebrating. “I had to tell him three-four that he was bowled over his head.”
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He would suppress his laughter to not prolong the batsman’s humiliation. “It was really tough not to laugh, but if I did it would look bad on the batsman,” he says. Steve Waugh was another famous victim, whereupon he couldn’t resist laughing. “He ducked a slower ball and was trapped lbw.” A meticulous learner, a young Waugh realised the slower ball’s benefits and developed a back-of-the-hand variation.
As would Chris Cairns, his roommate during the Nottinghamshire days. “He was certainly my roommate, but I don’t know what he learned from me,” he says in a cryptic tone. Wasim Akram too watched him closely to finesse more weapons. “Did he? He needn’t have, because he had everything — pace, swing, reverse swing.” Cairns foxed Graham Thorpe and Chris Read in the Lord’s Test of 1999 with the Moonball.
Like Cairns, Stephenson employed the ball widely in red-ball cricket too. His epochal 1000-run, 100-wicket season in 1988 — the last cricketer to have achieved the elusive feat — featured 25 Moonballs in his estimation. “The format doesn’t matter. A good ball is a good ball,” he says.
Stephenson never fulfilled the dream of playing for the West Indies. He was later part of the rebel tour to South Africa — in a different era, he would have been franchise-cricket gold. But his stamp endures, in multiple manifestations.
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Fast men in slow lanes of IPL
Jasprit Bumrah: He is a deceitful disguiser. Same action, arm-speed, ten-stepped stutter of a run-up, coming over high and fast, fingers aligned for a seam-up sortie — before, with an imperceptibly savage snap of the wrists, clockwise, as though opening a tight door, he drags his fingers down the right side of the ball. The fuller one swerves and floats; the good-length one comes lulled from the surface, as though time has stopped.
Lungi Ngidi: He has different versions — the leg-cutter, the off-cutter, the one from deep in his palms. The most famous is the slow dipper, with the ball held slightly deeper in his giant hands. The fingers go around the back of the ball and not over the top, so it doesn’t reduce his arm-speed; the ball comes out slower and dips later. The flight, though, is stable. His biggest strength is that he can alternate lengths.
Bhuvneshwar Kumar: Even for the same ball, different bowlers improvise the grip to suit them. To bowl the knuckle ball, Zaheer crooked his forefinger behind the ball and flicked it out as it left his hand; Bhuvneshwar bowls with an upright seam and bends the knuckles of the forefinger and middle finger to hold the seam with the fingertips, the thumb cushioning the ball. Zaheer’s used to dip precipitously, whereas Bhuvneshwar’s wobbles and then stops at the batsman, before slightly deviating away from the right-hander.
Ashok Sharma: He can crank up the pace upwards of 150 kph, but slash it down to below 100 kph too. His trusted method is the back-of-the-hand version. Control can be elusive, as with leg-breaks. But when he gets it right, it surreptitiously stuns batsmen — often from a hard length, the ball bouncing more than expected, drawing the pull, before it arrives as though on tranquilisers.
