'People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right - especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.' Thomas Sowell
I grew up in the People's Democratic Republic of Victoria. I was
indoctrinated early. Dean Jones was better than Viv Richards in
Victoria, and had a bigger ego as well. Darren Berry kept wicket with
the softest hands and hardest mouth of any keeper I have ever seen. Ian
Harvey had alien cricket. Matthew Elliott could score runs with his
eyes shut. The first time I saw Dirk Nannes bowl, I felt like Victoria
had thawed a smiley caveman. And even though I never saw Slug Jordan
play, I enjoyed his sledging for years on the radio.
So my favourite player has to be a Victorian. But my other love is
cricket's dark art, legspin. I wish I knew whether it was being a
legspinner that made me love legspin, or seeing a legspinner that made
me want to bowl it. Everything in cricket seemed easy to understand
when I was a kid, but not legspin. And that's where I ended up. I'm
not a good legspinner, far from it, but I think that any legspinner,
even the useless club ones that bowl moon balls, have something special
about them.
The first legspinner I ever fell for was Abdul Qadir. I'm not sure how I
saw him, or what tour it was, but even before I understood actual
legspin, I could see something special about him. His action was
theatrical madness and I loved it.
Then the 1992 World Cup came. I was 12, it was in Melbourne (read
Australia), and this little pudgy-faced kid was embarrassing the world's
best. I was already a legspinner by then, but Mushie made it cool.
This was the age where we were told spinners had no place; it was pace
or nothing. Limited-overs cricket was going to take over from Tests, and
spinners had no role in it. Mushie made that all look ridiculous as he
did his double-arm twirl to propel his killer wrong'uns at groping
moustached legends.
By worshipping Mushie I was ahead of the curve, because from then on, in
Melbourne, Australia, and eventually England, Shane Warne changed the
world. Mushie and Qadir had made legspinning look like it was beyond
the realms of understanding, but Warne made it look like something
humans could do, even if he wasn't human himself.
It was through Warne I got to Anil Kumble. He bowled legspin in such an
understated way. It was completely different to Warne. His wrist
wasn't his weapon, so he had to use everything else he had. Warne was
the Batmobile, Kumble an Audi A4. Anyone could love Warne, his appeal
was obvious. But to love Kumble you needed to really get legspin. The
legspinner's leggie.
When I was young, my second favourite was a guy called Craig Howard, who virtually doesn't exist.
Howard was the Victorian legspinner who Warne thought was better than
him. To my 13- and 14-year-old eyes, Howard was a demon. His legspin
was fast and vicious, but it was his wrong'un that was something
special. Mushie and Qadir had obvious wrong'uns, subtle wrong'uns, and
invisible wrong'uns. Howard had a throat-punching wrong'un. It didn't
just beat you or make you look silly; it attacked you off a length and
flew up at you violently. I've never seen another leggie who can do
that, but neither could Howard. Through bad management and injury he
ended up as an office-working offspinner in Bendigo.
But good things can come from office work. It gave me my favourite
cricketer of all time. A person who for much of his 20s was a
struggling club cricketer no one believed in. But he believed. Even as
he played 2nds cricket, moved clubs, worked in IT for a bank, something
about this man made him continue. A broken marriage and shared custody
of his son. His day job had him moving his way up the chain. The fact
that no one wanted him for higher honours. His age. Cameron White's
legspin flirtation. And eventually the Victorian selectors, who didn't
believe that picking a man over 30 was a good policy.
Through all that, Bryce McGain continued to believe he was good enough. Through most of it, he probably wasn't. He was a club spinner.
Bryce refused to believe that, and using the TV slow-mo and
super-long-lens close-ups for teachers, he stayed sober, learnt from
every spinner he could and forced himself to be better. He refused to
just be mediocre, because Bryce had a dream. It's a dream that every
one one of us has had. The difference is, we don't believe, we don't
hang in, we don't improve, and we end up just moving on.
Bryce refused.
The world would be a better place if more people saw McGain as a hero
and not a failure. He just wanted to fulfil his dream, and that he did
against all odds is perhaps one of the great cricket stories of all time
At 32 he was given a brief chance before Victoria put him back in club
cricket. Surely that was his last chance. But Bryce refused to believe
that. And at the age of 35 he began his first full season as
Victoria's spinner. It was an amazing year for Australian spin. It was
the first summer without Warne.
Almost as a joke, and because I loved his story, I started writing on my
newly formed blog that McGain should be playing for Australia. He made
it easy by continually getting wickets, and then even Terry Jenner paid
attention. To us legspinners, Jenner is Angelo Dundee, and his word,
McGain's form and the circumstances meant that Bryce suddenly became the
person most likely.
Stuart MacGill was finished, Brad Hogg wanted out, and Beau Casson was
too gentle. Bryce was ready at the age of 36 to be his country's
first-choice spinner. Then something happened. It was reported in the
least possibly dramatic way ever. McGain had a bad shoulder, the reports said. He may miss a warm-up game.
No, he missed more than that. He missed months. As White, Jason
Krezja, Nathan Hauritz and even Marcus North played before him as
Australia's spinners. This shoulder problem wouldn't go away. And
although Bryce's body hadn't had the workload of the professional
spinners, bowling so much at his advanced age had perhaps been too much
for him. He had only one match to prove he was fit enough for a tour to
South Africa. He took a messy five-for against South Australia and was picked for South Africa. He didn't fly with the rest of the players, though, as he missed his flight. Nothing was ever easy for Bryce.
His second first-class match in six months was a tour match where the South African A team attacked
Bryce mercilessly. Perhaps it was a plan sent down by the main
management, or perhaps they just sensed he wasn't right, but it wasn't
pretty. North played as the spinner in the first two Tests. For the
third Test, North got sick, and it would have seemed like the first bit
of good fortune to come to Bryce since he hurt his shoulder.
At the age of 36, Bryce made his debut
for Australia. It was a dream come true for a man who never stopped
believing. It was one of us playing Test cricket for his country. It
was seen as a joke by many, but even the cynics had to marvel at how
this office worker made it to the baggy green.
I missed the Test live as I was on holidays and proposing to my
now-wife. I'm glad I missed it. Sure, I'd wanted Bryce to fulfill his
dream as much as I'd wanted to fulfill most of mine, but I wouldn't have
liked to see what happened to him live. South Africa clearly saw a
damaged player thrown their way and feasted on him. His figures were
heartbreaking: 0 for 149. Some called it the worst debut in history.
I contacted him after it, and Bryce was amazingly upbeat. He'd make it
back, according to him. He was talking nonsense. There was no way back
for him. Australia wouldn't care that his shoulder wasn't right; he
couldn't handle the pressure. His body, mind and confidence had cracked
under pressure. He was roadkill.
But Bryce wouldn't see it that way, and that's why he's my favourite
cricketer. I wasn't there for all the times no one believed in him, for
all those times his dream was so far away and life was in his way. But I
was there now, at what was obviously the end. Bryce McGain saw the
darkness but refused to enter it. That's special. That is how you
achieve your dreams when everything is against you.
Before I moved to London to embark on my cricket-writing career, I met
Bryce for a lunch interview. It was my first interview with a
cricketer. We were just two former office workers who had escaped. At
this stage Casson had been preferred over him for the tour to the West
Indies. In the Shield final, Bryce's spinning finger had opened up after
a swim in the ocean. He was outbowled by Casson and the selectors
didn't take him. Surely this was it. Why would anyone pick a
36-year-old who had been below his best in his most important game?
Bryce knew he may have blown it. But he still believed, of course. We
were just two former office workers with dreams. Two guys talking about
legspin. Two guys just talking shit and hoping things would work out.
At the time it was just cool to have lunch with this guy I admired, but
now I look back and know I had lunch with the player who would become my
favourite cricketer of all time.
The world would be a better place if more people saw McGain as a hero
and not a failure. Shane Warne was dropped on this planet to be a god.
Bryce McGain just wanted to fulfil his dream, and that he did against
all odds is perhaps one of the great cricket stories of all time.
Abdul Qadir, the former Pakistan legspinner, has said he rues the fact that the Lahore-born Imran Tahir
went on to play for South Africa and not Pakistan. Tahir had met Qadir
in Lahore on Tuesday, and will remain in Pakistan for the rest of the
week, for personalised training sessions in preparation for South
Africa's tour of England in July.
The pair had worked on increasing the variations in Tahir's bowling. "He
is here to enhance his variations, and sought my guidelines regarding
the finger googly and using flight as a weapon," Qadir told
ESPNcricinfo. "He is very keen to learn more and I love to help him,
because he applies what I teach him. I have only shared the googly
information with him and Shahid Afridi."
Qadir is confident of Tahir making an impression in England. "England
[have always] struggled against spin bowling a lot, but once it comes to
their home conditions, they are good. I have shared my past experiences
with Tahir, told him how to counter English batsman in their own
conditions … I am optimistic that he will make an impact with his
improved bowling."
Tahir, who has played seven Tests for South Africa, played cricket in
Pakistan from 1996 to 2006. "My relations with Imran aren't something
new," Qadir said. "I've know this boy since he was playing in the
Under-19 team here; he had tremendous talent and I was urging the
[Pakistan] board to try him. I still regret not having this boy in
Pakistan colours, but I am proud of him."
Tahir was once part of the Pakistan A team and was one of the popular
legspinners on the Pakistani domestic circuit in 90s. He was team-mates
with Shoaib Malik and Abdul Razzaq in 1996, in the Under-19 squad that
played against England and Australia.
"He has played an ample amount of cricket in Pakistan, it's unfortunate
that we couldn't have him playing for Pakistan," Qadir said. "He was so
hardworking and a good learner, and always wanted to play cricket on the
big stage. He eventually got there, where he always wanted to get.
"This is not the first time he has come up to me for tips, he was
consistently in touch with me and always visits me when he is here in
Lahore."
Umar Farooq is ESPNcricinfo's Pakistan correspondent
Richie Benaud, the celebrated leg spinner also
known for his legendary one-liners in the commentary box, once said, “a
bleeding ring finger at the end of every training session was not only
normal but essential for my development as a wrist spinner.”
Being one of the most influential and highly-regarded leg-break
bowlers at a time when leg-spin was both rare and misunderstood, Benaud
knew what he was talking about. He recalls spending most of his late
teenage years at the New South Wales Colts’ nets. He would practice
landing his stock delivery on the same spot for hours on end.
“Four times a week I would turn up at exactly quarter to three with
Billy Watson (who coincidentally would go on to play for Australia
himself) and practice in the same net.”
Numerous others would show up at their own leisure to replace Billy,
but Benaud would keep practicing until the last ray of light had faded
into yet another Sydney summer evening.
“It (leg-spin bowling) is perhaps the hardest and most complex facet
of cricket”, Benaud said and the “easiest thing starting out would be to
keep it simple and true to your ability.”
The end of that statement is perhaps more significant than it has
ever been, for the modern day leg-spinner has to learn not only the
complex art, but also to grow out of the shadow of the greatest spin
wizard of them all — Shane Warne.
The apparent simplicity of the genius, with his easy flowing action,
unprecedented success and captivating personality seems to offer the
perfect road map for an aspiring leg spinner.
In the years since Warne’s retirement, talented young bowlers have
devoted their energies to modelling themselves on the brilliant
Victorian, misguidedly expecting such an ordeal to be rewarding. The
truth, however, truth is far closer to the contrary. Such pursuits often
give birth to “spinners” who rarely turn the ball or for that matter,
possess any of the other bamboozling variations (flipper, top-spinner,
googly) so essential to the authentic leggie’s bag of tricks.
The explanation to this fascinating conundrum lies in both the sheer
inimitable genius of Warne and the finer aspects of the leg-spinning
trait itself.
Leg-spin, unlike any of the other bowling traits, does not require a
high-arm delivery release. The bowler, instead, is required to have the
shoulder stretch a bit to the side at the point of delivery. This is due
to the peculiar and extremely strenuous way the ball is released from
the wrist (the flick).
Abdul Qadir ripping a leggie (notice the arm to the side)
The round arm action makes it much easier for the bowler’s wrist to
make the necessary flicking movement, transitioning from facing the sky
to facing the bowler at the time of release. It also allows for the
maximum number of revolutions to be imparted on the ball, resulting in
the drift and fast turn, which are crucial to the lethal leg break.
What determines the amount of turn more than any thing else, however,
is the pivot of the legs of the spinner. This pivot has to be strong
because it needs to drag the entire body with it, the rule being that
the greater the momentum the greater the turn. The pivot is greatly
aided by a side-on action. If the bowler is completely side-on in the
delivery stride, half his work is already done for his body can then
easily be dragged with the momentum generated by the motion of delivery.
Mushtaq Ahmed and Devendra Bishoo completely side-on – making it easier to pivot
The authentic leg-spinner’s action then requires an equal amount of
work to be done by the front arm and the bowling arm, resulting in quick
shifts in momentum that appear a bit haphazard in real time. This leads
to “funny” actions being associated with leg-break bowlers.
My whole analysis goes out of the window when you look at Shane
Warne. Having the most insignificant of jumps, Warne’s action is much
more front-on compared to the traditional leg-spinner. His action
doesn’t involve the extravagant movements associated with the likes of
Qadir or Mushtaq and is in fact so fluent and easy on the eye that it
often appears deceptively lethargic.
Shane
Warne gets much more front-on and also avoids the extravagant momentum
shifts to display one of the most graceful bowling actions .
“How, then, did the magician conjure the wicked turn that mesmerised
so many?” Mike Gatting would surely ask. And the answer really can only
be attributed to the oddity of Warne’s natural ability. His shoulder and
wrist, both freakishly strong and flexible, were able to impart a
vicious spin on the ball that others will find impossible to replicate.
This freakish nature is demonstrated even more clearly when you
notice his variations. The top spinner and googly, the most common
leg-spinning variations, both require the ball to be released with a
very different wrist position compared to the stock ball, needing the
back of the hand to end up facing the batsman (top spinner) or the
ground (googly) after release. This is an extreme change that normal
bowlers cannot achieve by a simple adjustment of the wrist. A change in
the point of delivery is essential to bowling these variations. Where
initially the shoulder stuck out to the side, the arm is now closer to
the head for the variations. Compare, for instance, Qadir’s top spinner
to his normal action shown above.
Abdul Qadir’s action; much more round arm for the change ups.
Qadir was not alone in needing to make this switch. Almost all
leg-spinners who have versatility, so crucial to being a complete wrist
spinner, have to rely on this slight give-away to land their change-up
deliveries effectively.
Kaneria Legbreak Kaneria Googly (Blue:Head, Red:Line of Release)
Now compare this to Warne, and the difference is evident.
Shane Warne Legbreak Shane Warne Googly
In fact, comparing Shane Warne’s repertoire just confirms why it was
so hard to pick the great spinner, who was able to churn out his entire
array of deliveries without the slightest hint of change in his action
or release point. His strong shoulder and unusually flexible wrists bore
the brunt of the change up every time.
(Left to Right/Top to Bottom: Leggie, Wrong-un, Flipper, Slider)
Therefore, while Warne’s ability to turn the ball and perfectly
camouflage his variations is nothing short of breathtaking, one must at
the same time keep in mind the anatomy and natural gift of the great
spinner that frankly can’t be imitated. With his destructive attitude
and knack of getting under the batsman’s skin, Warne is definitely the
embodiment of an attacking spinner.
Aspiring newcomers have a lot to learn from his attitude but would be
better suited to look towards the traditional greats in Qadir and
Benaud when it comes to modelling and reconstructing bowling actions.
Being an aggressive spinner is not about bowling flat and fast. Quite the opposite, and you only have to look at veteran bowlers operate in Twenty20 to see that
Aakash Chopra
April 14, 2011
Grounds are getting smaller, wickets flatter, bats thicker. And just to make it tougher for bowlers, the format of the game has got shorter. As if the rule book doesn't already favour batsmen, these "innovations" have stacked the odds against bowlers higher still. But while it has ostensibly become tougher for bowlers to succeed, good ones will always have their say.
Who are these "good bowlers", though? In the pre-Twenty20 era these were men who could simply bowl quick, for a batsman needed special skills to get on top of someone bowling at 145kph. It was widely believed that the shorter the format, the smaller the role of a spinner. In fact, the only way for a spinner to survive in Twenty20 was to bowl quick and flat, or so it was believed for the longest time.
But a look at the spinners in action in the current IPL is enough to tell you an entirely different story. Spinners who're bowling slower in the air are ruling the roost.
Is it only about bowling slow or it there more to it? Let's take a look at what's making these bowlers ever so successful.
A big heart
While fast bowlers are the stingy kind, who hate runs being scored off them, spinners are more often than not advised to be generous and to always be prepared to get hit. Bishan Bedi would tell his wards that a straight six is always hit off a good ball and one should never feel bad about it. Having a big heart doesn't mean that you should stop caring about getting hit; rather that you shouldn't chicken out and start bowling flatter.
Suraj Randiv could easily have bowled flatter when he was hit for two consecutive sixes by Manoj Tiwary in the first match, but he showed the heart to flight another delivery, and got the better of his opponent. You rarely see Daniel Vettori or Shane Warne take a step back whenever they come under the hammer. Instead of thinking of ways to restrict damage, they try to plot a dismissal.
Slow down the pace
Most young spinners don't realise that the quicker one bowls, the easier it gets for the batsman, who doesn't have to move his feet to get to the pitch of the ball and smother the spin. You can do fairly well while staying inside the crease, and small errors of judgement aren't fatal either, as long as you're playing straight.
The slower the delivery, the tougher it is to generate power to clear the fence, but there are no such issues if the bowler is sending down darts. In fact, even rotating the strike is a lot easier if the bowler is bowling quicker, for you need great hands to manoeuvre the slower delivery.
Yes, it is perhaps easier to find the blockhole if you're bowling quick, but you're not really going to get under the bat and bowl the batsman, since you don't have that sort of pace.
Also, if you bowl quick, the chances of getting turn off the surface (unless it is really abrasive) are minimal. You must flight the ball and bowl slow to allow the ball to grip the pitch and get purchase.
Attack the batsman
Mushtaq Ahmed tells young spinners that they need to have the attitude of fast bowlers to attack batsmen.
Attacking the batsman is often misinterpreted as bowling quick. That's what the fast men do; you hit them for a six and you're almost guaranteed a bouncer next ball. For a spinner, attacking has a different meaning - going slower and enticing the batsman.
Bowling slow must not be confused with giving the ball more air. The trajectory can still remain flat while bowling slow. Some batsmen are quick to put on their dancing shoes the moment the ball goes above eye level while standing in the stance, so it's important to keep the ball below their eye level and yet not bowl quick. Vettori does it with consummate ease and reaps rewards. He rarely bowls quick; he relies on changing the pace and length to deceive the batsman. And if the batsman is rooted to the crease and is reluctant to use his feet, you can flight the ball.
Add variety
The best way to not just survive but thrive as a spinner is to keep evolving.
Anil Kumble not only slowed down his pace but also added a googly to his armoury in the latter half of his career. Muttiah Muralitharan added another dimension to his bowling when he started bowling the doosra. Suraj Randiv stands tall at the crease and extracts a bit of extra bounce. Ravi Ashwin has mastered the carrom ball.
Instead of learning to undercut the ball (which is obviously a lot easier to develop), it's worth developing a doosra, a carrom ball or some other variety.
Young kids must understand that when you bowl flatter-faster deliveries, the ball behaves somewhat like a hard ball does on a concrete surface, skidding off the pitch. Slower balls, on the other hand, act like tennis balls, with far more bounce.
Up and coming spinners need to set their priorities right. They can either bend the front knee to reduce height while taking the arm away from the ear to bowl darts, or learn from the likes of Warne, Vettori, Murali and the like to succeed in all formats, provided the basics are right.
Twelve years ago, Abdul Qadir, still good enough to turn out for Pakistan, spent a summer playing club cricket in Melbourne. The few who saw him remember it like it was yesterday
On a sticky Peshawar afternoon in 1998, Mark Taylor clipped a Test triple-hundred while Pakistan's spinners tossed and chased and collected one wicket for 327 runs. Next morning Abdul Qadir, who was not any more a Pakistani Test spinner, and hadn't been for eight years, found himself in a car bound for Princes Park in one of Melbourne's lovelier suburbs.
Carlton was playing Footscray that day.
Carlton was Abdul Qadir's new club.
Driving the car was Carlton's vice-president, Craig Cook, who was relating the contents of an email his legspinning son Calum had sent - something about a Footscray batting wiz named "Larko".
"Tell Abba," the email went, "that Larko only picks wrong'uns from off the track, not out of the hand."
Qadir stared out the windscreen. The car pulled up at the oval.
"Hey Abdul," roared Ian Wrigglesworth, Carlton's captain. "Listen. Larko can't pick a wrong'un. You set it up, do whatever you want."
Qadir nodded and said nothing. Not until many minutes later, as they were walking out to field, did he ask politely: "When does this Larko come in?"
Larko was Rohan Larkin, an ex-state batsman, and he stepped out that day at No. 4.
Qadir watched him approach, stuck a fielder at close gully. And bowled. Wrong'un. Larkin, failing to pick it, went to square cut. The ball smacked the bat's edge and whistled through first slip's hands for two.
"Great," Larkin thought, "I'm off the mark and I've seen his wrong'un. I'll be right from here."
Qadir's second ball was faster; wicketkeeper Micky Butera rocked back instinctively on his heels. It was also wider. "Very close to the edge of the pitch," says Larkin. It was too wide to make mayhem, so wide that the umpire cleared his throat and gave a preliminary twitch of his arms. Larkin flung his own arms high, his bat even higher - "to allow the ball to travel through harmlessly".
Instead the ball dipped - swooped, more like - as if by remote control. It landed, veered headlong in the wrong direction, then hit middle stump, like Shane Warne dumbfounding Mike Gatting all over again. In reverse.
"Abdul spun this wrong'un one and a half feet," gasps Butera. "Sounds ridiculous when you say it."
"I would play that ball the same way a hundred times out of a hundred," believes Larkin.
"There was an element of luck in the Warne ball," Cook points out. "Whereas Abdul's was absolutely contrived."
The only person not surprised was the contriver himself. Deep down, Qadir knew that by rights he should have been in Peshawar that Saturday, playing for his country not a suburb. His Carlton team-mates knew that he knew it. He did not need to say so; though sometimes he said it anyway. There was and remained only one wonder of Pakistani spin.
But Qadir was 43. His face was unwrinkled. Brown eyes still danced with mischief. But selectors of Test teams have no love for 43-year-olds.
That was why he wasn't in Peshawar. It does not explain how he came to be playing park cricket in Melbourne.
****
IT HAPPENED, like many of the best ideas, after a long and jolly lunch. The Carlton Cricket and Football Social Club was the setting. Big Jack Elliott, football club president and one-time prime ministerial aspirant, glared at the cricket club vice-president and barked: "Why can't you bastards win like us?"
"Well," said Craig Cook, "we've lost a little bit of flair. We really need a big-name player."
Big Jack barked again. "You get the player and we'll pay for it."
On his last weekend in Melbourne he was handed the new ball, not for the first time that summer. And for the umpteenth time, from midday till sundown, he bowled and bowled and bowled
Cook, a legspin fanatic, thought of Qadir. He phoned an old pal, Javed Zaman Khan, cousin of Imran. An evening net tryout was arranged and Cook's ticket to Lahore booked. "We took Abdul down to the Lahore Gymkhana Club nets, where he bowled for an hour. And he looked beautiful. We signed him up on the spot."
Forty thousand dollars Carlton paid him. They put him up in a flat in Brunswick, not far from the practice nets. Larkin was one of eight men from Footscray he fooled that Saturday. At spectator-less playing fields all over Melbourne, the ranks of the befuddled grew: at Windy Hill, at Arden Street, at Ringwood's Jubilee Park.
Arms bucked and swayed and his tongue kept licking his fingers when Qadir skipped in and bowled. The passing of decades had taken a few spikes out of his flipper, which now slid more than it spat. But the miracles of his legbreak remained two-fold: the sheer stupendous size of the spin, and the way he could vary it at will. Wrong'uns, meanwhile, arrived in threes.
"Three types," Butera confirms. There was a lightning wrong'un, a mid-paced wrong'un lobbed up from wide of the stumps, and a slow wrong'un. "It looked like a lollipop," Butera says of this last invention, "and the batsman would think, here's an opportunity to come down and score. But it would drop incredibly late, and as soon as the batsman got there he'd realise he didn't have as much time as he thought he had." The lollipop wrong'un left more batsmen licked than any of Qadir's other variations, helping Butera rewrite the Victorian Cricket Association record books for most catches and stumpings in a season.
"Best time of my life. Abdul put me on the map," he says. That is not just rosy-glassed affection talking. Nine days after the Larkin ball Butera, previously unheralded, made his state 2nd XI debut.
Mid-January came; an encounter with the competition's in-form batsman beckoned. Geelong's Jason Bakker, tall and lumbering and toe-tied against even the gentlest spin bowling, had heard all about Qadir's variations. His coach Ken Davis tried to replicate them, hurling balls down, floating them up, while Bakker watched Ken's hand in the hope of reading what might happen. After a week of this it was time to face the real thing in a match. And it felt, to Bakker, as if he were still in the practice nets.
With eyes wide open he'd stare at Qadir's wrist. He left balls he was supposed to leave. He defended others comfortably. If he could get to the pitch of the ball, he'd drive. When it was wider, he'd cut, but softly, never forcing anything. Bakker had heard batsmen more debonair than him talk about being in "the zone", and for the first time he really understood it. "This sounds incredibly vain but I felt like I didn't play a false stroke."
They paused for drinks. Captain Wrigglesworth despaired. He trotted up to his star bowler. "Listen. This bloke's picking your wrong'un."
And just like that Qadir stopped bowling it. No flipper or flotilla of multi-speeded googlies. The magic act was over. Every ball was a legbreak, landing on or slightly outside off stump. Every ball twisted harmlessly away. This went on for an hour. It was a scorching afternoon, a flat deck. Bakker cruised past 50. "I'd broken him." And something else had happened too - "I was getting more confident, more relaxed, less vigilant."
So when another one wafted down, as ho-hum as all the others, Bakker took one stride forward and shouldered arms, intent on letting the thing whirr past, and then just as it was about to bounce, inches from his nose, he noticed that this particular delivery was actually a touch wider, and the seam looked different, and by then it was too late to do anything other than think, "Shit I hope it misses", which it didn't. It knocked back middle stump.
Eleven years on, Bakker's head is still shaking. "An hour - he was prepared to wait an hour. There was I falsely thinking I had broken him, when all that time he was working up a trap for me. I mean, my God, the mentality of the man, the mindset."
Later Qadir would boast, "I saw it in his eyes" - saw that microscopic let-up in the batsman's vigilance, which was what he had been waiting for all along.
****
HE LIVED for Saturdays, his new team-mates sensed. In his inner-city flat he was on his own. The club vice-president drove him to matches, to training. Most nights he ate at the vice-president's house. "Abdul had never cooked a meal in his life," Cook explains. "Never made a cup of tea in his life. So if he wasn't eating at our place I'd organise the Pakistani community to bring food in. And he got a bit lonely, so I'd have to go around and see him."
He would clap opposition batsmen's fine strokes. He would tell people what a pleasure it was to meet them. "No, no," he politely informed his captain one gusty Saturday, "I will bowl downwind." Another Saturday, batting against a fast bowler and a spinner, he insisted that his team-mates jump the fence to alternately ferry out and fetch his helmet at the end of every over.
He did not swear. When Qadir was around, Butera used to soften his own language. "But I don't think the rest of the boys did."
He did not lairise, throw high-fives or drink beer. "I wouldn't have thought he made a friend while he was here," says Wrigglesworth. "I don't know what he did from Monday to Friday and I wouldn't have thought many people do. As soon as the game finished on a Saturday he was pretty much off. I don't think he sang the team song once."
The song, in fairness, was seldom aired, for Carlton kept losing despite Qadir's wickets. By the eve of the season's final match at Northcote Park he had 66 - only seven shy of the post-war record set by Richmond quick Graeme Paterson in 1965-66. Qadir thought about that record often. "He never," Cook reflects, "reckoned he should have been left out of the Test side. So when he came over here it wasn't a holiday. He was wanting to show what he could do."
On his last weekend in Melbourne he was handed the new ball, not for the first time that summer. And for the umpteenth time, from midday till sundown, he bowled and bowled and bowled. His preoccupation with the record and those seven elusive wickets had become something close to an obsession. Nobody except Wrigglesworth and the Carlton committee men realised this - until, that is, the fall of Northcote's ninth wicket, Qadir's sixth, at which point he bounced into the team huddle and shrieked: "One more!"
"If he had just shut his gob," says Wrigglesworth, "no one else would have known. Instead the boys were all going: 'Hey, hang on a minute!'"
One more, alas, did not come easily. Northcote's last-wicket pair looked untroubled. Runs flowed. Wrigglesworth thought about taking Qadir off. Wrigglesworth couldn't take him off. "By this stage," he says, "I was a puppet of the president and the committee. And they wanted to see Abdul get this record."
A few short years later Douggie was picked for Australia's team of intellectually disabled cricketers. He has since represented his country in South Africa and England, this stranger who had never bowled a wrong'un until the day he met Abdul Qadir and asked how it was done
Qadir kept going. He ran through all his variations. The partnership kept swelling - to 95 by the tea break. Forty-six overs Qadir had bowled unchanged.
"Should I take him off now?"
Permission was granted. Five balls later the wicket fell.
The Ryder Medal he won as the competition's best player still hangs on his wall in Lahore. His 492 overs in a season might never be surpassed. Seventy-two wickets at 15.87 in the era of covered pitches at the age of 43 is a feat carved in club cricket legend. It could have been 73, the record should have been his, he told the Age's gossip columnist the day before he flew home; if only the captain had listened, if only the captain had bowled him a bit more.
"Oh, Abdul," sighed Wrigglesworth when he saw the paper next morning. "Where's this come from?"
****
WHEN Jason Bakker remembers the day that he did not play a false stroke and was deceived by the most mysterious ball he ever faced, he thinks of the heat. At tea-time he galloped upstairs to the Kardinia Park dining room and began gulping down water. "I was tucking into rockmelon and watermelon and whatever else I could find." That's when he glanced out the window and saw that Qadir, who had bowled through the entire afternoon session without a rest, was still on the oval.
Qadir was out there with Craig Whitehand, known to all at Geelong Cricket Club as "Douggie", the guy who fronted up every Saturday in his whites and his spikes to drag off the pitch covers and carry out drinks and take care of the equipment. As Qadir was walking off, Douggie had stopped him at the players' gate and asked, how do you bowl a wrong'un. Now the two of them were standing on the grass, metres apart. A couple of balls lay between them. Qadir would wave his arms and talk a bit. Then he'd bowl a few. Then Douggie would bowl a few. After a while Qadir would wander across and say something. Then Douggie would bowl a few more.
Bakker went back to his watermelon and forgot what he'd seen. Twenty minutes went by before he thought about strapping the pads back on. "As I was coming down the stairs," Bakker recalls, "I looked out on the ground. And the two of them were still there. Abdul had given his whole break on a hot day to this guy from Geelong who he knew nothing about."
At Geelong training the next week Douggie was gleefully flighting wrong'uns. A few short years later he was picked for Australia's team of intellectually disabled cricketers. He has since represented his country in South Africa and England, this stranger who had never bowled a wrong'un until the day he met Abdul Qadir and asked how it was done.
Christian Ryan is a writer based in Melbourne. He is the author of Golden Boy: Kim Hughes and the Bad Old Days of Australian Cricket, published in March 2009
Most childhood myths endure for longer than they should. Some are never forgotten. So it has been with me in the matter of Bishan Singh Bedi, the Sardar of spin and the most prolific of India's famed quartet of the sixties and seventies. Once mythical status had been bestowed on Bedi by me, mesmerised I was and remain, by the exploits and imagined possibilities of the man blessed with that poetic bowling action.
It all started with a conspiratorial revelation by an uncle when I was at an age when wonder and superheroes rule, and logic and reality are alien concepts.
Clustered around the radio we sat one day, listening to the commentary of a Test match India was playing in. A gaggle of excited kids, surrounded by our own expert commentators - vocal fathers, uncles, and the odd grandfather thrown in to maintain a semblance of decorum amid the mob.
And then, in what I am certain was a tense situation in the match, Bedi proceeded to concede not one but three boundaries in one over. Consternation all around. A forest of hands thrown up in dismay, followed by shouts of "He is going to ruin this for India if he continues!" and "Bring Prasanna on right away!" from not just the kids but even the adults in the group. In the midst of all this agitation, my eyes caught an uncle sitting there, smiling at the radio, a sea of calm. He leaned over to me and whispered with theatrical intrigue, "Don't worry. This is just a part of Bedi's plan. He will make the batsman pay in a few overs. He is setting him up to look foolish. Be patient."
Disbelief replaced the alarm on my face, but cashing in some of the trust and goodwill the uncle had accumulated in me, I turned to the radio again. Surely he was putting me on? Payback in a few overs' time? How does that work? Surely the batsman was no fool to get sucked into Bedi's extended sting operation?
The next Bedi over upped the ante. A relatively quiet over; no wicket falls. Quick look at the uncle begets just a knowing smile and raised eyebrows. Back to the radio again, staying away from the rest of the mob, now being led by the grandfather himself in hollering for the local lad, Erapalli Prasanna. Two or three balls into Bedi's next over and I hear, "And he has bowled him! Through the gap between bat and pad. Completely deceived him in flight. Bedi strikes!" Look up in disbelief and see the conspiratorial look replaced by a look of satisfaction, hands rubbing in delight.
Thus the myth enters the imagination. So the bowler pays up, and pays up again and again till the batsman coughs it up and hands it over sheepishly. The phrase "buying a wicket" was now de rigueur all of a sudden. It also proceeded to cause endless headaches every time Bedi was bowling. Following the progress of the match became a temporal jigsaw puzzle that had no solution. Every ball was a head-scratcher in itself: furious thinking would ensue as one tried to place it in a pattern initiated overs ago. Or was a new sequence of trickery starting with it? Now, was that a set-up ball, to be cashed in by the Sardar a few overs later, or just a bad one? Or was it just an innocent bridge piece in the composition before the cymbal crash came, causing the batsman to walk back? Wicket balls were the easy ones, and a relief, too, for they reset the puzzle. Yes, those times were magical. The period when the strategy has sunk in but the tactics are shrouded in mystery.
With exposure begins the fraying of the edges of the myth. The rewards for the watcher are substantial. When the fundamental aspects of a spinner's art reveal themselves gradually, causing one to follow the game in a completely different way. When the batsman's footwork begins to reveal secrets about the ball that was bowled. When the amount of daylight between the umpire and the bowler at the point of delivery is keenly noted. And when a batsman's looking foolish as he loses his wicket is not a reason to giggle at him but a time to look at the bowler in admiration. Foolishness needs to be pried out of good batsmen, and it is truly special when it happens.
Every ball was a head-scratcher in itself: furious thinking would ensue as one tried to place it in a pattern initiated overs ago. Or was a new sequence of trickery starting with it? Now, was that a set-up ball, or just a bad one? Or was it just an innocent bridge piece in the composition before the cymbal crash came, causing the batsman to walk back?
Once this comprehension had set in, Bedi's bowling was a fascinating study. I remember, for example, a dismissal of Kim Hughes in the seventies. Hughes, with his superb ability to use his feet against spinners, had many memorable battles against Bedi, but this one stands out to this day. Flighting the ball and pitching it up each time, Bedi proceeded to get Hughes to use his feet and advance repeatedly to smother any turn and drive the ball into the V. Then, as if feigning a realisation of folly, he proceeded to draw back the length of his deliveries over a few overs. Of course, Hughes caught on and the advances down the pitch became less pronounced as this developed. Till the momentous over when the length had been dragged back, ever so gradually, enough to be unobtrusive. Then, the offering. A flighted and floated delivery that was creamed into the stands for six. A slightly fuller ball followed, but Hughes was ready with his immaculate drive for four. But he had already swallowed the bait, except he didn't know it yet. Till a ball later. Floated up again, but a shade shorter. Hughes rocked back to cut but the arc of his bat was still at its midway point when the ball crashed into his stumps. The dipping faster arm-ball had done him in. The sting operation had lasted at least five overs. Hughes made it to the front pages as proof the next day, bat in mid-air, stumps pegged back, looking down in horror and looking a tad foolish. And my uncle was still a prophet.
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to, So that when they turn their backs on you, You get the chance to put the knife in. - "Dogs", Roger Waters (Pink Floyd)
Those were the rock n' roll days, and thus it went on with Bedi for years to come. Many were the heists that were designed and executed by him, with his accomplice Prasanna, another genius in the genteel art of mid-air deceit and deception, against players of all ilk, at venues of all geographical persuasion. Newspapers regularly brought us pictures of duped and out-plotted batting stars, looking the wrong way, staring back perplexed at stumps astray, stranded out of position having whiffed at the ball, or nailed on the back foot seconds after the ball fizzed into their pads bang in front. Looking foolish all the time.
THE RETIREMENTS OF BEDI AND CO. brought on a dry period in world cricket of the hoodwinking spinner, with just one notable exception in Abdul Qadir in the eighties. The nineties gave us some wonderful spinners in Anil Kumble and Muttiah Muralitharan. Very special bowlers they were and are, but they somehow didn't fit the image of the con artist or the trickster that was tattooed on my brain. Nirvana came in the form of the blond bamboozler who announced himself to the world in the most dramatic manner, with his first Ashes ball, conferring honorary legendary status on Mike Gatting instantly.
As the second Test of the recently concluded Ashes series started at Lord's this summer, in the Sky Sports box was Shane Warne, fresh off the poker tables of Las Vegas, donning his latest role, of commentator. As he added a welcome Aussie angle and drawl to the mix, with his "Aww, look mate…" exclamations, he also provided an acute reminder, right through the rest of the series, as to what we were profusely missing this time around. Just the 2005 Ashes in themselves contained among his haul of 40 wickets a cornucopia of poster shots memorable to this day, of wide-eyed batsmen who had just been duped in grand larcenous style.
Two examples should suffice for now. Michael Vaughan at Trent Bridge, minutes after he had walked out to join Andrew Strauss in England's run-chase. Using his impeccable footwork, leaning towards the pitch of a ball outside leg to play it quietly towards midwicket. And then… picture this aftermath. A visibly mystified Vaughan scrambling back and searching for the ball at a non-existent short fine leg, looking quizzically towards Adam Gilchrist, then staring at a hooting Ricky Ponting at silly point, oblivious to the fact that the ball rested in Matthew Hayden's paws at first slip.
And Andrew Strauss in the second innings at Edgbaston. If there ever was a "ball of the century", one that would have startled Daryll Cullinan off his couch in amazement, here it was. The poster depicts Strauss standing upright, left foot in line with off stump, right foot all the way across to the edge of the pitch, head turned around in a voyage of discovery, in utter bewilderment that while he had been trying to pad up to a delivery apparently heading towards first slip, he had somehow managed to lose his leg stump. He had been conned and schemed into an absolutely improbable stance and dismissal (the set-up commenced, tellingly, when Warne castled him in the first innings). Michael Slater needed to be administered oxygen in the commentary box to recover from his bout of hysterical chortling.
Jim Laker, the great England spinner, once opined that his idea of paradise was being at Lord's, bathed in glorious sunshine, with Ray Lindwall bowling at one end and Bedi at the other. My idea of cricketing paradise may feature other dramatis personae, and the lunch break on the fourth day of the Oval Test of the 2009 Ashes provided a reminder of one. Out in the middle alongside Nasser Hussain was Shane Warne, executing a masterclass on legspin bowling with two teenaged tyros from the counties. Substantially more portly than two years ago, but sporting a warm and cheerful smile and demeanour, Warne went through the intricacies of his legendary repertoire with them. And then, as the wide-eyed aspirants watched, he twirled the ball in his hands, gamely walked over to the top of his run-up, turned… and for a brief, very brief, moment it turned magical again.
The casual walk from his mark, the handful of strides to the crease and that simple, glorious and uncomplicated action burst into view once again. The ball looped out perfectly, drifted innocuously away and then back, dipped and landed on a perfect length. It gripped on that practice wicket and spat furiously off it at a disconcerting height towards second slip. There was no batsman to be spooked by it, and the makeshift keeper jumped to collect it over his shoulder. Surely millions of English eyes watching this widened in terror for an instant, faces turning pale at the thought of Warne running rampant on the baklava-top yards away that the Test match was being played on. Warney, looking like a chubby frat-boy, drawled "Not too bad!" turned and walked back to his gawking students. He ended his class with an exhortation to them to work hard at their craft and to just enjoy bowling legspin because it was "a lot of fun". "And we get to make batsmen look foolish," he added with a huge grin.
I find myself constantly looking for the image of the batsman completely flummoxed, gobsmacked, hoodwinked and strung-on to a memorable demise. I blame Bedi and Warney for this quest more than any others. And the uncle who started it all.
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Shane Warne will rightly be celebrated as the greatest legspinner of all time, especially after an individual performance in The Ashes that has few rivals. But if he is widely acknowledged to have made legspin fashionable again in the 1990s, one man - Abdul Qadir - took the first, necessary step of making it acceptable in the '80s. On his 50th birthday and nearly 28 years after he hopped, skipped and danced into cricket, we speak to the original modern-day legspinner about his career, his art and Warne.
You are 50 today. How would you look back at your time in cricket?
I am very thankful that I got to play in such a good era for the game and with so many great players. Obviously I am also proud that I revived an art like legspin, especially in a time when there were hardly any spinners who had any success. I am happy that I was involved in bringing alive an art that was so valuable but had become redundant. My time was dominated by fast bowlers and to have taken 236 Test wickets in that is something I am very proud of. Then, pitches wouldn't assist turn that much, especially not on the first or second day as they do now, and to have played and played well then is an achievement.
Why did you take up legspin in that time?
It just happened, starting off in the street matches we used to play. But legspin became like a love affair with me, like you would have with a woman. I used to sleep with the ball by my side at night. I picked up all the variations myself because I loved it so much, I wanted to discover more about the art, find out how it can work, what makes it tick, what makes it special, how it can succeed in different conditions.
What attributes do you need to be a good legspinner?
You need courage, above all. With the ball, you need to have complete control over line and length - this is absolutely crucial. So many legspinners can get good turn and bounce but just don't have any control and thus aren't successful. You also need to be a good thinker about the game, more than other bowlers I think. That is why Shane Warne is successful, because he really thinks about his game. Variation is crucial as well. Field placings and having an idea of what fields to bowl to is important; you can't just rely on the captain to set fields for you. Finally, an ability to use the crease well, although it is underrated, is very important.
What do you make of the state of legspin today?
This is the most fulfilling thing for me. When I started, it was unheard of to bowl legspin, especially in ODI matches. To bowl to batsmen like Ian Botham in a match and get their wickets with legspin - that didn't happen. And now, the highest wicket-taker in the world and one of the greatest bowlers of all time is Shane Warne. Close behind him is another great, Anil Kumble, and in Pakistan, we had Mushtaq (Ahmed) after me and now Danish Kaneria. This is vital for the game itself and for viewers because they get to see some really accomplished performers executing a rare art. After me, there has been a mela (festival) of legspinners and that is great for the game. It's just great to see bowlers like that in a game now and having so much success.
What did you think of Warne's performances in the Ashes series?
Absolutely amazing and full credit to him; 40 wickets in any series is an unbelievable haul. But I would like to point out that English players play legspin so badly that at times it is inevitable bowlers will succeed against them. I would go as far as to say that several club batsmen in the subcontinent would play legspin better than some of the English batsmen today. You wouldn't have batsmen being bowled around their legs like some English players were. They can't use their pads properly against balls pitching around leg stump and find it impossible to read from the hand. Above all, sweeping a legspin bowler is one of the worst ways of playing him. You can't account for the bounce or the turn so it becomes too dangerous.
He [Warne] is simply one of the greatest bowlers ever. His record speaks for itself. The best thing about him, what sets him apart, is his heart and bravery
How would you rate Shane Warne?
There is no rating - he is simply one of the greatest bowlers ever. His record speaks for itself. The best thing about him, what sets him apart, is his heart and bravery. Legspin is mostly about being brave. You know you might get torn apart, you know, occasionally, you might bowl a loose delivery but you also know you will take wickets and to keep that attitude is the most important thing. Also he has tremendous control. He can do pretty much what he wants with the ball, the amount of spin he wants to impart, where he wants to land it. If you have control as a legspinner, then you have a basic ingredient to be successful. It also helps if you have a reputation like he does. So many batsmen are already lost before they even step out on the pitch against him that even when he does bowl a loose delivery they still end up either getting out to it or not scoring off it.
What do you think of Danish Kaneria?
He is an excellent bowler but the only thing I worry about is his attitude and just how aggressive he gets. It's good to have aggression but when you have just gotten rid of Justin Langer after he has almost scored a double century and you celebrate like you have won and give him a send-off, that is not good. You have to have respect for good players and especially those who have dominated you. He should worry that he got him out after such a huge score and not early on. Brian Lara really hit Kaneria everywhere and dominated him but when Danish got him, with a poor ball as well, he celebrated like no tomorrow. As a bowler he doesn't really have many weaknesses - good action, variety and control but it is his attitude that is a concern I think. You have to respect your opponent, especially players of calibre. Also he is playing so much county cricket, he has exposed himself to batsmen. I avoided it because I didn't want to sell my art, I didn't want batsmen to know my tricks. But with Danish, they might have a better idea of how to play him now, having seen him play at county level so often. He should be a matchwinner against England in this series and I hope he will be.
It was always said that you had a lot of variety, which was the key to your success. Nowadays it can be argued that bowlers like Kumble and Warne may be don't possess the variety you did but are still so successful. How important then is variety in a legspinner's armoury?
This is a good question. See today, the performances of Warne and Kumble are there. Nobody can or should doubt their achievements. But there is no fun there in the bowling. Partially, I guess it is due to a decline in the quality of batsmanship today. Because it has gone down, that variety is not actually needed because you can get them out repeatedly with one or two types of balls - they are unable to cope with it. When I was playing, you used to have batsmen like Imran (Khan), Kapil (Dev) and Hadlee coming so low down the order and they were quality players. It is an indication of how strong top orders were then. Now because batting is not of the standard it used to be, you don't need to have too much variety to succeed.
You said that you had three deliveries: the googly, legbreak and the flipper. Where did your variety come from?
These are all part of the art. This is what makes it what it is, the building blocks. The variety comes from how you use them. So you use the crease, approach it from different angles, get different amounts of turn. I developed two googlies, one that came from the back of the hand and the other that was a finger-spinning googly delivered with a conventional legbreak action. If you bowl from close to stumps, you get more spin but from wider it spins less. I used to do all sorts of things not just different types of balls. Going wide of the crease, coming closer to the stumps, bowling from behind the crease, dropping your shoulders a little, bowling the same ball but with different grips or actions; all of it should be part of the package of a legspinner.
You had a very distinct, unique action and you once said it was a construction.
Yes, it was an artificial action. As I became more experienced, I started realising the importance of uncovering the psyche of batsmen and playing on it. The action was for show really, to create a physical aura, to give them that feeling of `wow, who and what is this coming in to bowl?' and work on their minds even before I bowled to them. My natural action was very different, quite beautiful. It was like Wasim Raja's action only right-arm. It was also designed for deception, to shield the ball from batsmen. It is important with legspin to not allow batsmen to read from your hand because those who can will play you really well. Our whole job is about deceiving batsmen and so hiding your grip is important. So the action worked in that way as well. Actually, that is one thing about Warne - he doesn't hide his hand too much and good batsmen should be able to read him fairly easily because he has such an open action. My first advice to any budding spinner: you should hide your hand as much as is possible from batsmen. Obviously though, 600 wickets later, we can't really say to Warne that he should change his action!
You also had a successful one-day career - not many legspin bowlers used to play in ODIs.
I thought it was a great injustice when I wasn't picked early in my career as an ODI player. I could bat handily as well at times so I used to get very annoyed. I actually fought with Imran Khan to be picked for the ODI squad. I asked him, as a captain, what do you want from me? He said, any bowler who gives away roughly 40 runs in ten overs and not more I will pick. I said to him the day I give 41 runs you drop me from the team. Like this I fought to get into the side. And in my first match I took 4-21 against New Zealand at the World Cup.
Did you go in with a different attitude to a one-day match?
See, it depends on the situation of the match. If you are defending a small total, then I find it best to attack, go all out, and crowd the batsman with fielders. If you have been dismissed for 150 runs, then you just have to bowl them out so you take a chance and attack as much as you can. That is something you don't always see from bowlers, any bowlers, today. The whole game has gone so much in favour of batsmen that it is difficult for bowlers to attack.
Who was the most difficult batsmen you bowled to?
You know it all depended with me on how I was feeling. If I didn't have any rhythm then even tailenders used to frighten me. But if I had some rhythm then nobody could scare me. I remember one Test where I had to bowl to Geoff Lawson and I was in such low confidence and poor rhythm that I spent an evening worrying about how badly he could hit me and how he would sweep a legbreak from outside off-stump to the fine leg boundary. But if I was in the mood and feeling good, then nobody scared me. It is part of my psyche, whether at Test level or club level. If you can conquer me do so, but if you can't, then I will be all over you. All or nothing, do or die. If I got a wicket early then I would run through but if I didn't then I could go for over a hundred runs for none.
9 for 56 vs England, Lahore, 1987-88
Unfortunately remembered more for umpire Shakeel Khan's itchy finger than Qadir's wrists, this was nevertheless vintage. He came on after only 10 overs and began by deceiving fully Graham Gooch with a googly. He continued for another 37overs, teasing, taunting, appealing, bemusing and getting the occasional dodgy one from umpire Khan to end with the best bowling figures by a Pakistani.
6 for 16 vs West Indies, Faisalabad, 1986-7
The genesis of Qadir's torment of the West Indies. Chasing 240 to take the series lead, the visitors crashed to 53 all out in just over 25 overs. Qadir bowled nine of them and in a twinkling of googlies, legbreaks and the occasional flipper, deceived six batsmen, including the batting heart - Richie Richardson, Larry Gomes and Sir Viv Richards.
7 for 96 vs England, The Oval, 1987
The pitch, according to Qadir, offered nothing but runs. The other spinners - John Emburey, Phil Edmonds and Tauseef Ahmed bowled 162.3 overs between them for three wickets; Qadir bowled 97.4 overs for ten wickets, thus proving Qadir's own theorem-where no one else can succeed, legspin can find a way. His 7-96 in the first innings set up the chance for a win and only dropped catches and stodgy rearguard from Mike Gatting and Ian Botham in the second prevented it.
5 for 44 vs Sri Lanka, Leeds, 1983 (World Cup)
In 1983, playing a legspinner in an ODI was cricketing taboo. Qadir fought with Imran for his selection, Imran fought with the selectors and on his debut Qadir befuddled New Zealand with 4 for 21 and the match award. Two matches later, with Sri Lanka cruising at 162-2 in pursuit of 236, Qadir removed Roy Dias, Duleep Mendis and Arjuna Ranatunga to induce a startling collapse. He finished with five and Pakistan squeaked home by 11 runs.
4 for 83 vs West Indies, Trinidad, 1988
Qadir left his mark not only on the fiercest rivalry of the 80s, but also one of the decade's best series. Although his role with the bat - permanently undervalued - was crucial in eventually scrapping a draw, he feasted on a strong middle order in the first innings, getting rid of Gus Logie and Carl Hooper. But his dismissal of Richards, chewing gum and swinging bat, both threateningly, for 49 runs that kept West Indies to a controllable 174 was essential. Richards' violent century in the second confirmed the form he was in. The pitch and umpiring, says Qadir, could only be defied by his legspin and Imran's reverse.
Terry Jenner played nine Tests for Australia in the 1970s but it is as a coach, and specifically as Shane Warne's mentor and the man Warne turned to in a crisis, that he is better known. Jenner said that his CV wouldn't be complete without a trip to India, the spiritual home of spin bowling, and this September he finally made it when he was invited by the MAC Spin Foundation to train youngsters in Chennai. Jenner spoke at length to Cricinfo on the art and craft of spin bowling in general and legspin in particular. What follows is the first in a two-part interview.
"Most of the time the art of the spin bowler is to get the batsman to look to drive you. That's where your wickets come"
How has the role of spin changed over the decades you've watched cricket?
The limited-overs game has made the major change to spin bowling. When I started playing, for example, you used to break partnerships in the first couple of the days of the match and then on the last couple of days you were expected to play more of a major role. But in recent years, with the entry of Shane Warne, who came on on the first day of the Test and completely dominated on good pitches, it has sort of changed the specs that way.
But the difficulty I'm reading at the moment is that captains and coaches seem to be of the opinion that spin bowlers are there either to rest the pace bowlers or to just keep it tight; they are not allowed to risk runs to gain rewards. That's the biggest change.
In the 1960s, when I first started, you were allowed to get hit around the park a bit, as long as you managed to get wickets - it was based more on your strike-rate than how many runs you went for. So limited-overs cricket has influenced bowlers to bowl a negative line and not the attacking line, and I don't know with the advent of Twenty20 how we'll advance. We will never go back, unfortunately, to the likes of Warne and the wrist-spinners before him who went for runs but the quality was more.
What are the challenges of being a spinner in modern cricket?
The huge challenge is just getting to bowl at club level through to first-class level. When you get to the first-class level they tend to you allow you to bowl, but once you get to bowl, instead of allowing you to be a free spirit, you are restricted to men around the bat - push it through, don't let the batsman play the stroke, don't free their arms up ... all those modern thoughts on how the spinner should bowl.
Do spinners spin the ball less these days?
The capacity to spin is still there, but to spin it you actually have to flight it up, and if you flight it up there's always that risk of over-pitching and the batsman getting you on the full, and therefore the risk of runs being scored. So if you consider the general mentality of a spinner trying to bowl dot balls and bowl defensive lines, then you can't spin it.
I'll give you an example of an offspin bowler bowling at middle and leg. How far does he want to spin it? If he needs to spin it, he needs to bowl a foot outside the off stump and spin it back, but if he has to bowl a defensive line then he sacrifices the spin, otherwise he'll be just bowling down the leg side.
It's impossible for you to try and take a wicket every ball, but when you're really young that's what you do - you just try and spin it as hard as you can and take the consequences, and that usually means you don't get to bowl many overs. The art of improving is when you learn how to get into your overs, get out of your overs, and use the middle deliveries to attack
Legspinners bowling at leg stump or just outside - there's been so few over the years capable of spinning the ball from just outside leg past off, yet that's the line they tend to bowl. So I don't think they spin it any less; the capacity to spin is still wonderful. I still see little kids spinning the ball a long way. I take the little kids over to watch the big kids bowl and I say, "Have a look: the big kids are all running in off big, long runs, jumping high in the air and firing it down there, and more importantly going straight." And I say to the little kids, "They once were like you. And one of you who hangs on to the spin all the way through is the one that's gonna go forward."
Great spinners have always bowled at the batsman and not to the batsman. But the trend these days is that spinners are becoming increasingly defensive.
First of all they play him [the young spinner] out of his age group. Earlier the idea of finding a good, young talent, when people identified one, was that they didn't move him up and play him in the higher grade or in the higher age group. There was no different age-group cricket around back then, and if you were a youngster you went into the seniors and you played in the bottom grade and then you played there for a few years while you learned the craft and then they moved you to the next grade. So you kept going till you came out the other end and that could've been anywhere around age 19, 20, 21 or whatever. Now the expectation is that by the time you are 16 or 17 you are supposed to be mastering this craft.
It's a long apprenticeship. If you find a good 10- or 11-year-old, he needs to have a ten-year apprenticeship at least. There's a rule of thumb here that says that if the best there's ever been, which is Shane Warne - and there is every reason to believe he is - sort of started to strike his best at 23-24, what makes you think we can find 18- or 19-year-olds to do it today? I mean, he [Warne] has only been out of the game for half an hour and yet we're already expecting kids to step up to the plate much, much before they are ready.
It's a game of patience with spin bowlers and developing them. It's so important that we are patient in helping them, understanding their need for patience, at the same time understanding from outside the fence - as coach, captain etc. We need to understand them and allow them to be scored off, allow them to learn how to defend themselves, allow them to understand that there are times when you do need to defend. But most of the time the art of the spin bowler is to get the batsman to look to drive you. That's where your wickets come, that's where you spin it most.
Warne said you never imposed yourself as a coach.
With Warne, when I first met him he bowled me a legbreak which spun nearly two feet-plus, and I was just in awe. All I wanted to do was try and help that young man become the best he could be, just to help him understand his gift, understand what he had, and to that end I never tried to change him. That's what he meant by me never imposing myself. We established a good relationship based on the basics of bowling and his basics were always pretty good. Over the years whenever he wandered away from them, we worked it back to them. There were lot of times over his career where, having a bowled a lot of overs, some bad habits had come in. It was not a case of standing over him. I was just making him aware of where he was at the moment and how he could be back to where he was when he was spinning them and curving them. His trust was the most important gift that he gave me, and it's an important thing for a coach to understand not to breach that trust. That trust isn't about secrets, it's about the trust of the information you give him, that it won't harm him, and that was our relationship.
I don't think of myself as an authority on spin bowling. I see myself as a coach who's developed a solid learning by watching and working with the best that's been, and a lot of other developing spinners. So I'm in a terrific business-class seat because I get to see a lot of this stuff and learn from it, and of course I've spoken to Richie Benaud quite a lot over the years.
Shane would speak to Abdul Qadir and he would feed back to me what Abdul Qadir said. Most people relate your knowledge to how many wickets you took and I don't think that's relevant. I think it's your capacity to learn and deliver, to communicate that what you've learned back to people.
From the outside it seems like there is a problem of over-coaching these days.
There are so many coaches now. We have specialist coaches, general coaches, we've got sports science and psychology. Coaching has changed.
Shane, in his retirement speech, referred to me as his technical coach (by which he meant technique), as Dr Phil [the psychologist on the Oprah Winfrey Show]. That means when he wanted someone to talk to, I was the bouncing board. He said the most uplifting thing ever said about me: that whenever he rang me, when he hung the phone up he always felt better for having made the call.
"Think high, spin up" was the first mantra you shared with Warne. What does it mean?
When I first met Shane his arm was quite low, and back then, given I had no genuine experience of coaching spin, I asked Richie Benaud and made him aware of this young Shane Warne fellow and asked him about the shoulder being low. Richie said, "As long as he spins it up from the hand, it'll be fine." But later, when we tried to introduce variations, we talked about the topspinner and I said to Shane, "You're gonna have to get your shoulder up to get that topspinner to spin over the top, otherwise it spins down low and it won't produce any shape." So when he got back to his mark the trigger in his mind was "think high, spin up", and when he did that he spun up over the ball and developed the topspinner. Quite often even in the case of the legbreak it was "think high, spin up" because his arm tended to get low, especially after his shoulder operation.
Can you explain the risk-for-reward theory that you teach youngsters about?
This is part of learning the art and craft. It's impossible for you to try and take a wicket every ball, but when you're really young that's what you do - you just try and spin it as hard as you can and take the consequences, and that usually means you don't get to bowl many overs. The art of improving is when you learn how to get into your overs, get out of your overs, and use the middle deliveries in an over to attack. I called them the risk and reward balls in an over. In other words, you do risk runs off those deliveries but you can also gain rewards.
There's been no one in the time that I've been around who could theoretically bowl six wicket-taking balls an over other than SK Warne. The likes of [Anil] Kumble ... he's trying to keep the lines tight and keep you at home, keep you at home while he works on you, but he's not trying to get you out every ball, he's working a plan.
The thing about excellent or great bowlers is that they rarely go for a four or a six off the last delivery. That is the point I make to kids, explaining how a mug like me used to continually go for a four or six off the last ball of the over while trying to get a wicket so I could stay on. And when you do that, that's the last thing your captain remembers, that's the last thing your team-mates remember, it's the last thing the selectors remember. So to that end you are better off bowling a quicker ball in line with the stumps which limits the batsman's opportunities to attack. So what I'm saying is, there's always a time when you need to defend, but you've got to know how to attack and that's why you need such a long apprenticeship.
Warne said the most uplifting thing ever said about me: that whenever he rang me, when he hung the phone up he always felt better for having made the call. Richie Benaud writes in his book that his dad told him to keep it simple and concentrate on perfecting the stock ball. Benaud says that you shouldn't even think about learning the flipper before you have mastered the legbreak, top spinner and wrong'un. Do you agree?
I totally agree with what Richie said. If you don't have a stock ball, what is the variation? You know what I'm saying? There are five different deliveries a legbreak bowler can bowl, but Warne said on more than one occasion that because of natural variation you can bowl six different legbreaks in an over; what's important is the line and length that you are bowling that encourages the batsman to get out of his comfort zone or intimidates him, and that's the key to it all. Richie spun his legbreak a small amount by comparison with Warne but because of that his use of the slider and the flipper were mostly effective because he bowled middle- and middle-and-off lines, whereas Warne was leg stump, outside leg stump.
Richie's a wise man and in the days he played there were eight-ball overs here in Australia. If you went for four an over, you were considered to be a pretty handy bowler. If you go for four an over now, it's expensive - that's because it's six-ball overs. But Richie was a great example of somebody who knew his strengths and worked on whatever weaknesses he might've had. He knew he wasn't a massive spinner of the ball, therefore his line and length had to be impeccable, and he worked around that.
In fact, in his autobiography Warne writes, "What matters is not always how many deliveries you possess, but how many the batsmen thinks you have."
That's the mystery of spin, isn't it? I remember, every Test series Warnie would come out with a mystery ball or something like that, but the truth is there are only so many balls that you can really bowl - you can't look like you're bowling a legbreak and bowl an offbreak.
Sonny Ramdhin was very difficult to read as he bowled with his sleeves down back in the 1950s; he had an unique grip and unique way of releasing the ball, as does Murali [Muttiah Muralitharan]. What they do with their wrists, it's very difficult to pick between the offbreak and the legbreak. Generally a legbreak bowler has to locate his wrist in a position to enhance the spin in the direction he wants the ball to go, which means the batsman should be able to see the relocation of the wrist.
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In part two of his interview on the art of spin bowling, Terry Jenner looks at the damage caused to young spinners by the curbs placed on their attacking instincts. He also surveys the current slow-bowling landscape and appraises the leading practitioners around.
"Most spin bowlers have enormous attacking instinct, which gets suppressed by various captains and coaches" Nagraj Gollapudi
Bishan Bedi once said that a lot of bowling is done in the mind. Would you say that spin bowling requires the most mental energy of all the cricketing arts?
The thing about that is Bishan Bedi - who has, what, 260-odd Test wickets? - bowled against some of the very best players ever to go around the game. He had at his fingertips the control of spin and pace. Now, when you've got that, when you've developed that ability, then it's just about when to use them, how to use them, so therefore it becomes a matter of the brain. You can't have the brain dominating your game when you haven't got the capacity to bowl a legbreak or an offbreak where you want it to land. So that's why you have to practise those stock deliveries until it becomes just natural for you - almost like you can land them where you want them to land blindfolded, and then it just becomes mind over matter. Then the brain does take over.
There's nothing better than watching a quality spin bowler of any yolk - left-hand, right-hand - working on a quality batsman who knows he needs to break the bowler's rhythm or he might lose his wicket. That contest is a battle of minds then, because the quality batsman's got the technique and the quality bowler's got the capacity to bowl the balls where he wants to, within reason. So Bishan is exactly right.
What came naturally to someone like Bedi was flight. How important is flight in spin bowling?
When I was very young someone said to me, "You never beat a batsman off the pitch unless you first beat him in the air." Some people think that's an old-fashioned way of bowling. Once, at a conference in England, at Telford, Bishan said "Spin is in the air and break is off the pitch", which supported exactly what that guy told me 40 years ago. On top of that Bedi said stumping was his favourite dismissal because you had beaten the batsman in the air and then off the pitch. You wouldn't get too many coaches out there today who would endorse that remark because they don't necessarily understand what spin really is.
When you appraised the trainees in Chennai [at the MAC Spin Foundation], you said if they can separate the one-day cricket shown on TV and the one-day cricket played at school level, then there is a chance a good spinner will come along.
What I was telling them was: when you bowl a ball that's fairly flat and short of a length and the batsman goes back and pushes it to the off side, the whole team claps because no run was scored off it. Then you come in and toss the next one up and the batsman drives it to cover and it's still no run, but no one applauds it; they breathe a sigh of relief. That's the lack of understanding we have within teams about the role of the spin bowler. You should be applauding when he has invited the batsman to drive because that's what courage is, that's where the skill is, that's where the spin is, and that's where the wickets come. Bowling short of a length, that's the role of a medium pacer, part-timer. Most spin bowlers have enormous attacking instinct which gets suppressed by various captains, coaches and ideological thoughts in clubs and teams.
You talked at the beginning of the interview about the importance of being patient with a spinner. But isn't it true that the spinner gets another chance even if he gets hit, but the batsman never does?
I don't think you can compare them that way. If the spinner gets hit, he gets taken off. If he goes for 10 or 12 off an over, they take him off. Batsmen have got lots of things in their favour.
What I mean by patience is that to develop the craft takes a lot of overs, lots of balls in the nets, lots of target bowling. And you don't always get a bowl. Even if you are doing all this week-in, week-out, you don't always get to bowl, so you need to be patient. And then one day you walk into the ground and finally they toss you the ball. It is very easy to behave in a hungry, desperate manner because you think, "At last, I've got the ball." And you forget all the good things you do and suddenly try to get a wicket every ball because it's your only hope of getting into the game and staying on. The result is, you don't actually stay on and you don't get more games. So the patience, which is what you learn as you go along, can only come about if the spinner is allowed to develop at his pace instead of us pushing him up the rung because we think we've found one at last.
How much of a role does attitude play?
Attitude is an interesting thing. Depends on how you refer to it - whether it's attitude to bowling, attitude to being hit, attitude to the game itself.
When Warne was asked what a legspin bowler needs more than anything else, he said, "Love". What he meant was love and understanding. They need someone to put their arm around them and say, "Mate, its okay, tomorrow is another day." Because you get thumped, mate. When you are trying to spin the ball from the back of your hand and land it in an area that's a very small target, that takes a lot of skill, and it also requires the patience to develop that skill. That's what I mean by patience, and the patience also needs to be with the coach, the captain, and whoever else is working with this young person, and the parents, who need to understand that he is not going to develop overnight.
And pushing him up the grade before he is ready isn't necessarily a great reward for him because that puts pressure on him all the time. Any person who plays under pressure all the time, ultimately the majority of them break. That's not what you want, you want them to come through feeling sure, scoring lots of wins, feeling good about themselves, recognising their role in the team, and having their team-mates recognise their role.
I don't think people - coaches, selectors - let the spin bowler know what his role actually is. He gets in the team and suddenly he gets to bowl and is told, "Here's the field, bowl to this", and in his mind he can't bowl.
Could you talk about contemporary spinners - Anil Kumble, Harbhajan Singh, Daniel Vettori, Monty Panesar, and Muttiah Muralitharan of course?
Of all the spinners today, the one I admire most of all is Vettori. He has come to Australia on two or three occasions and on each occasion he has troubled the Australian batsmen. He is a man who doesn't spin it a lot but he has an amazing ability to change the pace, to force the batsman into thinking he can drive it, but suddenly they have to check their stroke. And that's skill. If you haven't got lots of spin, then you've got to have the subtlety of change of pace.
And, of course, there is Kumble. I always marvel at the fact that he has worked his career around mainly containment and at the same time bowled enough wicket-taking balls to get to 566 wickets. That's a skill in itself. He is such a humble person as well and I admire him.
I marvel a little bit at Murali's wrist because it is very clever what he does with that, but to the naked eye I can't tell what is 15 degrees and what's not. I've just got to accept the word above us. All I know is that it would be very difficult to coach someone else to bowl like Murali. So we've got to put him in a significant list of one-offs - I hate to use the word "freak" - that probably won't be repeated.
I don't see enough of Harbhajan Singh - he is in and out of the Indian side. What I will say is that when I do see him bowl, I love the position of the seam. He has a beautiful seam position.
I love the way Stuart MacGill spins the ball. He is quite fearless in his capacity to spin the ball.
I love the energy that young [Piyush] Chawla displays in his bowling. The enthusiasm and the rawness, if you like. This is what I mean when I talk about pushing the boundaries. He is 18, playing limited-overs cricket, and at the moment he is bowling leggies and wrong'uns and I think that's terrific. But I hope the time doesn't come when he no longer has to spin the ball. When he tries to hold his place against Harbhajan Singh, for example. To do that he has to fire them in much quicker. He is already around the 80kph mark, which is quite healthy for a 18-year-old boy, but he still spins it at that pace, so it's fine. But ultimately if he is encouraged to bowl at a speed at which he doesn't spin the ball, that would be the sad part.
That's why I say this, there are lots of spinners around but it's the young, developing spinners who are probably suffering from all the stuff from television that encourages defence as a means to being successful as a spinner.
Monty is an outstanding prospect. You've got to look at how a guy can improve. He has done very, very well but how can he improve? He has got to have a change-up, a change of pace. At the moment, if you look at the speed gun in any given over from Monty, it's 56.2mph on average every ball. So he bowls the same ball; his line, his length, everything is impeccable, but then when it's time to knock over a tail, a couple of times he has been caught short because he has not been able to vary his pace. I think Monty is such an intelligent bowler and person that he will be in the nets working on that to try and make sure he can invite the lower order to have a go at him and not just try and bowl them out. That probably is his area of concern; the rest of it is outstanding.
What would you say are the attributes of a good spinner?
Courage, skill, patience, unpredictability, and spin. You get bits and pieces of all those, but if you have got spin then there is always a chance you can develop the other areas. For all the brilliant things that people saw Warne do, his greatest strength was the size of the heart, and that you couldn't see.
