“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe.
“Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer.
"My 80% friend isn't my 20% enemy" Ronald Reagan.
When Chris Gayle hit Rahul Sharma for five consecutive sixes in an IPL match in April, I found myself wondering not about Gayle's brute strength or his ability to hit sixes at will but the spinner's response to the onslaught. Would he slow it down, bowl a googly or try a big spinner?
Sharma changed his lines and lengths, but didn't significantly change his pace or variations. If anything, he bowled a bit quicker. Since he is believed to have modelled his action on the great Anil Kumble, it's worth deliberating how Kumble would have responded to such a situation. My educated guess tells me Kumble may have bowled a couple of googlies, taken the pace off another two, or tried a flipper, bowling it faster and pitching it short of a good length, so it skidded off the surface and forced Gayle to pull. All this may or may not have changed the outcome but the use of spinner's most potent weapon, deception, would definitely have made a contest of it.
Since Sharma is still cutting his teeth at international cricket, it's unfair to compare him to a man who has taken 600 Test wickets. But I like to believe that Kumble got to that milestone because of his desire to try something new each time, and not that he experimented only because he had a pile of wickets to support him. After all, records don't make men great; great men make records.
Let's take a look at how other spinners who have a realistic chance of playing for India in the next few years have responded in similar situations.
In the IPL, every time a left-hand batsman went after his bowling, Pragyan Ojha responded with yorkers aimed at the batsman's toes. Some missed their mark by a few inches, some were deposited into the stands by the likes of Gayle, and others went wide down the leg side.
Even Harbhajan Singh, despite his considerable experience, was guilty of bowling flat or fast yorkers under pressure.
Would Muttiah Muralitharan and Daniel Vettori have responded differently? Having watched them play in the IPL for the last five years, it's fair to say that both have enough tricks in the bag to not have to resort to bowling flat in these situations. Murali rarely bowls a yorker, for his strength lies in extracting spin off the surface and disguising his doosra. Vettori slows it down, keeps the ball hanging in the air for a fraction longer and changes his line to counter the onslaught.
R Ashwin is perhaps the only Indian fingerspinner willing to flight the ball, but unfortunately he too seems to be falling into the trap of bowling only doosras and carrom balls. He has compromised on a spinner's biggest strength, the ability to turn the ball, and his performance in Test cricket is getting affected by it.
Few try to get drift in the air or put enough revolutions on the ball to extract spin and bounce off the surface. Most spinners are just slow bowlers who break the monotony of seam bowling
Not surprisingly, legspinners Piyush Chawla and Amit Mishra refrained from bowling yorkers, because leggies struggle to find the blockhole at will. Mishra bowled variations in the latter part of the tournament, but Chawla wasn't too inclined to turn the ball away from the right-handers.
While it's a given that the best fast bowlers in the IPL will be overseas players, it's a worry if the best spinners are not Indian. But it's not just the IPL; there are no good spinners on India's domestic circuit either. Few try to get drift in the air or put enough revolutions on the ball to extract spin and bounce off the surface. Most spinners are just slow bowlers who break the monotony of seam bowling.
As young batsmen we were told to spend quality time honing our skills to defend against the turning ball. It was imperative to transfer the weight at just the right time, keep the bottom hand loose always, and play close to the body. To succeed in first-class cricket you had to have a solid defence and the ability to hit the turning ball along the ground.
We practised these by playing with a tennis ball from a short distance. Even then, hours of training weren't enough every time, because spinners like Bharati Vij, Venkatapathy Raju, Sunil Joshi, Kanwaljit Singh and others would use the SG Test ball to their advantage and extract both drift and spin. They would rarely bowl flat and fast, because even a batsman's fiercest assault could be countered by deception.
Turning the ball a bit more than expected to get bat-pad dismissals, beating the batsman in the drift and forcing him to edge it to slip, or exploiting poor weight transfer by getting the batsman caught at short cover or midwicket were regular modes of dismissals. As a batsman, it was imperative to look for the shiny side even when facing spinners, for that helped you read the direction of the drift and the arm balls.
Today, even talking about all this makes me feel nostalgic because I can't name a single spinner in the domestic circuit who uses these skills. I also don't see batsmen spending hours to get their forward defence watertight against spin. The only thing a modern batsman does is place the bat in front of the front pad to avoid lbw decisions. Most spinners, not looking to extract any turn, try to bowl wicket to wicket, expecting to get leg-before decisions in case the batsman misses the line. Fielders at short leg and silly point are of ornamental value, except on rank turners. This is a sorry state of affairs for a country that boasted many fine spinners.
The deterioration in the quality of spin started about a decade ago, but the IPL has aggravated it. Anyone willing to practise the traditional craft of spin bowling is routinely overlooked by the IPL talent scouts. The temptation of making it into an IPL team is so huge that compromising flight and spin for accuracy and flatter trajectories seems a small price to pay.
While there were many young left-arm spinners on show this IPL season, not one of them bowled with a high-arm action or looked suitable for the longer version of the game. The moment you bowl with a round-arm action and lower your arm, you cease to get bounce off the surface. It also doesn't allow you to put enough revolutions on the ball to get spin off the surface, which is why such bowlers rely heavily on dusty pitches to spin the ball.
It is a lovely sight to watch batsmen struggling to dig out accurate yorkers, but only if the practitioner operating 22 yards away is a fast bowler, not a spinner.
The Age of Deception: Nuclear
Diplomacy in Treacherous Times by
Mohamed ElBaradei
Reviewed by Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
This book, eloquently written by
a former director-general of the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is a must read, both
for the wealth of information it provides on the
contentious issues of global nuclear diplomacy as
well as for the passionate and compelling case
that it presents for a war crime tribunal to
prosecute United States and
British leaders who instigated the calamitous
invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the false pretext of
weapons of mass destruction.
In blunt yet
sincere language steeped in international law,
ElBaradei writes that in light of the US's
complete "disdain for international norms" in its
invasion of Iraq, the United Nations should
request an opinion from the International Court of
Justice (ICJ) as to the legality of the Iraq war.
Convinced
that the overwhelming weight of evidence favors a
negative verdict if the ICJ ever braved such an
initiative, ElBaradei then makes a case for the
International Criminal Tribunal to "investigate
whether this constitutes a war crime". (pg 87)
Irrespective, ElBaradei is so morally
outraged by the blatant pulverization of a
sovereign Middle East country by a Western
superpower and its allies that he also advises the
Iraqis to demand war reparations - that is sure to
amount to tens of billions of dollars.
If
for nothing else, this book's value - in putting
self-righteous Western powers on the defensive and
depicting them as essentially rogue states that
have caused a new global anarchy by their willful
exercise of power without much regard for the
rights of others - is indispensable.
Divided into 12 chapters with a useful
conclusion on the future of nuclear diplomacy, the
book covers nearly three decades of the author's
involvement with various cases, ie, Iraq, North
Korea, Libya and Iran, the notorious "nuclear
bazaar of Abdul Qadeer Khan" in Pakistan, as well
as nuclear asymmetry and the hypocrisy and double
standard, not to mention outright deceptions,
marking the behavior of US and other Western
countries (along the familiar North-South divide).
In the chapters on Iraq, ElBaradei defends
the cherished record of his agency in refusing to
act as a sounding board for post 9/11 warmongering
US policies, which earned him the occasional venom
of US media that questioned his integrity. In
fact, ElBaradei is equally critical of the
compliant Western media that often act as indirect
apparatuses of state despite their wild claims of
neutrality and objectivity.
Although much
of what ElBaradei writes about the US-British
deceptions to go to war in Iraq is already
well-known, it is instructive to revisit those
"grotesque distortions" - as he puts it - from a
reputable source who for years was caught in the
maelstrom of contesting politics of
non-proliferation.
With respect to the
British role under premier Tony Blair, whom he
accuses of a false alarm on Iraq's chemical weapon
capability, ElBaradei actually underestimates the
degree to which London influenced Washington on
Iraq, characterizing this instead as a "one-way
street" with the British "acting as apologists for
US". (pg 67).
But, ElBaradei is not a
foreign policy expert and his shortcoming, in
detecting the American foreign policy elite's
vulnerability with respect to British political
influence, is forgivable. This is a minor defect
in a solid contribution that sheds much light on
how the US manipulated the UN atomic agency as
"bit players" in its scheme to invade Iraq.
It shows the Pandora's box opened by the
IAEA when it agreed to receive foreign
intelligence from member states spying on others,
thus opening the door to calibrated disinformation
often beyond the ability of the agency and its
meager resources to authenticate.
As a
result, today the IAEA has turned into a de facto
''nuclear detective agency" that constantly
receives tips from Western clients targeting
specific countries. Sooner or later, either this
unhealthy situation is rectified or we must expect
more gaping holes in the agency's credibility.
With respect to North Korea, which has
exited the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
and proliferated nuclear weapons without much
international backlash, ElBaradei blames the US's
failure to live up to its agreed commitment and
the fallacy of "attempts to contain proliferation
ambitions through confrontation, sanctions, and
isolation". (Pg 109)
He also writes about
Libya's voluntary disarmament in 2004, a decision
that the late Muammar Gaddafi now regrets in his
grave, given the likelihood that the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would have
thought twice about attacking Libya under the
guise of "responsibility to protect", thus making
a mockery of the UN, if Tripoli had retained a
nuclear shield.
For sure, this issue must
loom large on the mind of many developing nations
that have clashing interests with the
(increasingly bullying) Western powers.
ElBaradei has devoted a whole chapter to
the subject of nuclear double standards that
discusses, for instance, how South Korea's clear
evidence of non-compliance was shoved under the
rug by the US in 2004 simply because it is a US
allay.
The US and other privileged
nuclear-have nations have been derelict in their
NPT obligations to move toward nuclear
disarmament, some, like France and Britain,
modernizing their arsenals, while at the same time
having the audacity of taking the moral high
ground against countries suspected of clandestine
proliferation.
ElBaradei writes that in
the Middle East, "The greatest source of
frustration and anxiety was the regional asymmetry
of military power symbolized by Israel's arsenal."
(pg 223) And yet, Israel, which since its
bombardment of Iraq's nuclear facility in 1981 has
been mandated by the UN Security Council to place
its nuclear facilities under the IAEA inspections,
has evaded this obligation with impunity.
Regarding Iran, extensively dealt with in
four chapters, ElBaradei seeks to present a
balanced account that pinpoints the chronology of
events, interactions and negotiations that are
still ongoing as of this date, thus making the
book an indispensable tool for those who follow
the developments in the Iran nuclear crisis.
Since his retirement from the IAEA,
ElBaradei has repeatedly gone on record to state
that during his tenure at the agency he never saw
any evidence that Iran was proliferating nuclear
weapons.
What is more, he informs readers
that after the 2007 US intelligence report that
confirmed that Iran's program had been peaceful
since 2003, "I received a follow-up briefing by US
intelligence. They did not show the supposed
evidence that had let them to confirm the
existence of a past Iranian nuclear weapon
program, other than to refer to the same
unverified set of allegations about weaponization
studies that had already been discussed with the
agency." (pg 269)
He also writes, "The
Americans did acknowledge - as in most previous
intelligence briefings - that there was no
indication that Iran had undeclared nuclear
material." (pg 262) Indeed, this is important
information, given that in more than a dozen
reports on Iran the IAEA has repeatedly confirmed
the absence of any evidence of military diversion
of "declared nuclear material".
In Chapter
11, on the "squandered opportunities" with Iran,
the author writes about Iran-IAEA cooperation
through a workplan that resulted in the successful
resolution of the "six outstanding" issues that
had led to the IAEA's referral of Iran's file to
the UN Security Council.
Missing in this
book is any mention of that workplan's concluding
paragraph that stipulated the agency's treatment
of Iran's nuclear file as "routine" once those
issues were resolved. That this did not, and as of
today has not, happened is solely due to the
US-led disinformation campaign that burdened the
IAEA with new data coming from a stolen Iranian
lap top, even though ElBaradei readily admits that
"the problem was, no one knew if any of these was
real". (pg 281).
He discretely blames his
deputy, Ollie Heinnonen, now turned into a
valuable US asset from his recruitment by Harvard
University, of buying "into the US accusations"
(pg 281), and laments the fact that on a number of
occasions the US scuttled meaningful negotiation
with Iran by "refusing to take yes for an answer".
Questioning the US's negotiation strategy
toward Iran, in a memorable passage that rings
relevant to today's context of new multilateral
talks with Iran, ElBaradei writes: "It was naive
to ask Iran to give up everything before the start
of the talks and expect a positive response. But
the problem was familiar, nothing would satisfy,
short of Iran coming to the table completely
undressed." (pg 313)
In a clue to the
direct relevance of this book to the Iran nuclear
talks this weekend in Istanbul, where the US has
put its foot down by demanding Iran's suspension
of its 20% uranium enrichment, ElBaradei readily
admits that under the NPT, Iran has the right to
possess a nuclear fuel cycle, like "roughly a
dozen countries" around the world. Moreover, he
reminds us of the absence of a legal basis for the
US's demand, in light of the fact that "many
research reactors worldwide also use 90% enriched
uranium fuel for peaceful purposes, such as to
produce medial radioisotopes". (pg 14)
As
he puts it in the final chapter, on the quest for
human security, this cannot be a selective, or
rather elitist, process that benefits some while
depriving others. In today's increasingly
interdependent world, the idea that the threat of
nuclear proliferation can be contained while the
asymmetrical nuclear-have nations hold onto their
prized possessions and even use them to threaten
the non-nuclear nations, is simply a chimerical
dream that has a decent chance of turning into a
nightmare. This is the core message of ElBaradei's
timely book that cannot be possibly ignored.
The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy
in Treacherous Times by Mohamed ElBaradei.
Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New
York, 2011. ISBN-10: 0805093508. Price US$27, 322
pages with index 340 pages.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that
allows guest writers to have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
"At present, we
are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP." - Paul Hawken
There is a dangerous lie that permeates
the media, government and general discourse of nearly every single nation on
Earth.
That lie is the Development Deception. This myth is based on
three concepts. First is the distinction between the developed nations (North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and
Japan), and the Developing Nations (everywhere else).
The second idea is
that "developing" countries can become "developed" through improved education,
stable governance, and opening their markets to trade and investment. The third
leg of this Deception is that such a transformation is not only possible, but
also desirable.
The metric used to distinguish "developed" nations from
"developing" nations is gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Poor nations
aspire to reach a certain economic level to become so-called "developed
nations". The Myth of Development has four fundamental inter-related flaws. The
first one is the problem of the Gray Area.
The gap between "developed"
and "developing" countries is presented as a simple black-and-white dichotomy. I
often hear from my Chinese students say, "China is a developing country. America
is a developed country. We want to become a developed country."
Fair
enough. But which country has high-speed trains? Which country has a higher
unemployment rate? How can the government of a "developed" country owe trillions
of dollars to a "developing" country?
Obviously many nations in Asia and
Africa, and Latin America have very serious structural problems, which could be
alleviated through stable government and educational reform. Very poor countries
should aspire to create social and economic institutions that allow their people
to live with dignity. Nevertheless the rise of new economic powers such as
Brazil, India, and (especially) China, coupled with the massive financial
difficulties faced by Europe, Japan, and the United States, call into question
the utility of the developed/developing dichotomy.
The second problem
with the Myth of Development is philosophical. The very term "development"
implies a steady linear progression from poverty and ignorance to wealth,
literacy, and general happiness. This viewpoint is Western in origin, and alien
to many of the world’s cultures.
The idea of the inexorable march of
progress has roots in the Judeo-Christian worldview of time (God creates the
world, the world exists, the world ends), and has been largely co-opted by
modern science. We are told to believe that progress is inevitable, that the
quality of life for each new generation will be better than the life of their
parents. Never mind the fact that humanity has created weapons that empower a
handful of political leaders to destroy civilization itself.
Never mind
obesity is now challenging starvation as a cause of premature death. Of course,
the advances made in the last century in curing diseases, increasing literacy
rates, and fighting hunger must be lauded. However, to blindly value "progress"
above all else threatens our very survival as a species.
The third
problem with the Development Deception stems from definitions. As mentioned
previously, GDP per capita is the standard the yardstick for measuring
development. This assessment ignores serious social difficulties faced by the
so-called developed nations.
For example, a third of the adult
population of the United States of America, the archetype "developed" nation,
suffer from obesity, with another third classified as overweight. The United
States of America also has the dubious distinction of having the highest
incarceration rate of any nation on Earth.
Meanwhile Japan, the paragon
of "development" in Asia, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world,
leading to a rapidly aging population. This trend, unless dramatically reversed,
will exacerbate Japan’s social, economic, and political crisis, as more retirees
put enormous strain on the working population. Japan’s population is set to
shrink by roughly thirty million over the next four decades (Citation here). Are
these worthy goals for the so-called "developing" nations to aspire to?
The fourth and final problem with the Myth of Development is a terminal
defect. Citizens in countries such as China and India are encouraged to join the
middle class and live "Western" lifestyles. As benign as it sounds, this goal is
completely impossible. Simply put, there are not enough natural resources on
this planet to sustain such an increase in consumption.
According to
World Bank figures, in 2008 Americans, on average, used 87,216 kilowatt hours of
electricity. The average Chinese used 18,608 kilowatt hours, and the average
Indian 6,280. All three countries depend primarily on coal for electricity. To
bridge the gap between these levels of resource utilization of would entail
environmental catastrophe and global shortages on an unimaginable scale. Coal is
just one example - one could also look at oil, lumber, or meat consumption.
Indeed, many of the fundamental challenges facing the world economic system -
such as rising food and fuel costs - are directly related to economic
development.
The Development Deception is perpetuated by international
corporations and national governments. Resource mining, production, and
overconsumption are the basis for the current globalized economic system. Human
beings are classified as "consumers", because overconsumption entails short-term
profit.
Rich nations leverage their "developed" status to influence
poorer nations, while the governments of these poor nations use the promise of
development to maintain political power. None of this propaganda changes the
fact that it is grossly misleading for the nations who over-consume the Earth’s
finite resources to be considered developed.
Advocates of The
Development Myth may point to science as a savior. We are constantly told that
new inventions will allow for more efficient use of resources, or allow for
sustainable consumption patterns. This argument provides only false hope. We
cannot speculate our way out of environmental pollution and a collapsing natural
resource base. Unless and until new "green" technology actually exists and is
utilized, science is actually exacerbating ecological disaster.
Recently, the Human Development Index (HDI) has been promoted as a more
"human-centered" alternative to GDP as a metric for measuring development. HDI
uses data on life expectancy, literacy, number of years in school, and GDP to
determine the development status of a country. Although this presents a useful
alterative, the continued use of GDP as a basis for measuring development is
HDI’s fundamental flaw. Unsustainable consumption of finite resources cannot
reasonably be classified as "development".
What is the viable
alternative to the Development Myth? Bhutan has advocated Gross National
Happiness as an alternative goal to increasing GDP per capita. Citizens are
asked about their Subjective Well Being in order to establish Gross National
Happiness. Obviously this measurement is difficult to define and numerate, and
ignores problems such as illiteracy and extreme poverty. However, it does point
in the right direction.
Development needs to be redefined in order to
account for human physical and emotional well-being as well as environmental
sustainability. Otherwise it is only a lie, and a dangerous one at that. To seek
economic advance at the expense of human interests and future generations is a
recipe for global disaster.
When extreme wealth is challenging extreme
poverty as the bane of human existence, a revolution of values is needed. We as
a species must advance values of conservation, and teach people to live within
the means of the productive capacity of our planet. No longer can the scramble
for nonrenewable resources be viewed as a zero-sum game. Human beings need to
develop solidarity on a global scale. Citizens of wealthy nations must learn to
live with less.
The most important development is that of the
individual. Social and spiritual harmony is the antidote to the Development
Deception, for all traditions encourage compassion and warn of the destructive
power of greed. To quote LaoZi (as translated by D C Lau):
There is no crime greater than having too many desires; There
is no disaster greater than not being content; There is no misfortune
greater than being covetous. Hence in being content, one will always have
enough.
Brendan P O'Reilly is a China-based writer
and educator from Seattle. He is author of The Transcendent Harmony.
Knowing when to attack and when to defend is crucial to the success of good spinners, and that comes only with experience. Terry Jenner talks to Nagraj Gollapudi
Nagraj Gollapudi
September 27, 2007
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.
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 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
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.
The replay comes up in slo-mo for us to get a closer look: Brett Lee runs in and bowls a short-pitched delivery at 150kph. Sachin Tendulkar seems to have all the time in the world to get into the right position - he goes back and across and plays it right under his eyes. The pace at which the TV camera reruns it makes it look a cakewalk, an everyday shot, but the batsman gets only a fraction of a second to judge, decide and execute. What is it that enables the likes of Sachin to tweak their responses and plan their shots?
Let me break it down further for you. At the point of release a batsman must ascertain the line and the length of the delivery, must weigh his options with regards to his response (attacking or defensive) and then move quickly to get his body into the right position to execute the option chosen. One of the principles of batting is to be prompt and to be in a position to receive the ball, as against arriving at the same time as the ball, because that is invariably too late. The quicker the bowler, the less time you have in hand to act. If the batsman fails to get his calculations right in time, he is most likely doomed. Unlike against slower bowlers, with whom you may have a second chance.
Judging the length and line
If judging the length and line early makes batting relatively more easy and effective, failure to do so puts the batsman at a disadvantage.
To judge the length, the batsman must watch the point of release of the delivery. The earlier the release, the fuller the ball, which in effect means that if the bowler delivers the ball at the first point of release, it would result in a beamer. Every subsequent delay in release would mean a reduction in the length, with the bouncer being the last point of release. That's the reason every batsman is taught to be ready for the full ball first, because that's the first possibility; if the bowler passes that point of release without delivering, the mind starts sending the body signals to be prepared to go on the back foot.
Batsmen around the world are brought up playing bowlers with high-arm actions and hence their minds are attuned to trying to ascertain the length by looking at the point of release. But if you're up against someone like Lasith Malinga or Shaun Tait, both of whom have slinging, round-arm actions, it's simply not possible to know the length for sure at the time of the delivery, as there is always a doubt about whether the release was early or delayed. The angle at which the arm comes down leaves a lot to the imagination; unfortunately, though, there isn't much time to imagine at their pace.
Another important aspect that influences the ability to judge length is the position of the batsman's head in his stance. Ideally the head should be still and the eyes level to be able to judge the length correctly. If the head is tilted upwards, even slightly, all deliveries might seem short-pitched.
Next comes the line. Batsmen try to keep a close eye on the bowler's wrist at the point of delivery and the position of the wrist with regards to the crease. In the case of a fast bowler, the tilt of the wrist may help send the ball in the direction in the direction it is tilted towards. When Ishant Sharma's wrist tilts towards the on side, you're more or less sure the ball will swing in to the right hander. This isn't foolproof, though, especially when the ball is reverse-swinging. Waqar Younis used to keep the wrist completely upright, or even slightly tilted towards the off side, while making the ball dip in to the batsman.
Wrist position is a good giveaway when it comes to reading spinners, many of whom cock their wrists to bowl topspinners. Similarly, the back of a legspinner's hand will usually face the batsman when he tries to bowl a googly. These variations are subtle but if observed and decoded accurately, they can help the batsman.
Makhaya Ntini's wide-of-the-crease action gave away the angle of his stock deliveries, which came in to the right-hander, while Glenn McGrath's close-to-the-stumps action ensured the ball stayed on a well-defined line around the off stump. An offspinner will usually prefer to come in close to the stumps to bowl the topspinner or floater.
While the wrists and the action will give you clues, keeping a still head in the stance, almost in line with the toes, is vital to your ability to judge line correctly as a batsman. The moment the head starts falling over, the lines get blurred - a problem Rohit Sharma is facing at the moment. Since his head is falling over, he's either chasing balls that should be left alone (in the first ODI against New Zealand) or finding the ball finishing in line with the front pad instead of in line with the downswing of his bat. From there on it's just a matter of when and not if he misses one.
Swing and drift
Batsmen also try to look at the way the bowler has gripped the ball, with regards to the position of his fingers and the orientation of the shiny surface. When bowling a slower one McGrath would hold the ball with his index and middle fingers split wide apart; Lee while doing similar would hold the ball deep in his hand. Zaheer Khan often bowls with his fingers across the seam, which tells you to be ready for a straight delivery because the ball won't swing unless the seam is upright.
One of the principles of batting is to be prompt and to be in a position to receive the ball, as against arriving at the same time as the ball, because that is invariably too late
The shiny surface, if visible, often gives away the direction in which the ball will move in the air. For instance, an offspinner's drift can be read by looking at which way the shiny part of the ball faces. If the ball is swinging conventionally, it will drift into the right-hander if the shiny side is outside, and vice versa. Keeping the shine facing the palm not only takes the ball away in the air, it also makes it skid after pitching, as the ball lands on the shiny side. Obviously, looking at the shine doesn't help much if you're up against the likes of Muralitharan, or someone who prefers to bowl with a scrambled seam.
Leg position
Once the line is deciphered, a batsman will mostly try to keep the front leg outside the line of the ball. For a right-hander the front leg must stay leg side of the ball. If the leg is not in the appropriate position, the bat will never come down straight, and you might end up playing across in front of your pads. Also, keeping the leg outside the line is mandatory to maintain good balance, or else you risk falling over.
There is a good chance, though, that these lines will get blurred when the ball's swinging or spinning too much. Murali and Warne have wreaked havoc because batsmen were never sure of the amount of turn off the surface while facing them. What started out seeming the correct place to plant the front foot often proved incorrect in the end. It's the same when the ball is reverse-swinging. Haven't we seen Waqar and Wasim hit people on the toes umpteen times?
Things are slightly more manageable on the back foot, because not only does the short ball give a little more time to adjust, it also doesn't swing as much.
The role bounce plays
Tall bowlers with high-arm actions, like McGrath, Ambrose, Kumble and so on, tend to generate more bounce than their round-arm, slingy counterparts like Malinga or Ajit Agarkar. While tall bowlers get consistent high bounce, it also often misleads the batsman into playing on the back foot, even to balls that are meant to be played on the front foot; this results in them getting trapped in front. On the other hand, bowlers like Malinga and Agarkar pose a different kind of threat - you can never trust the bounce with them. Playing horizontal bat shots and ducking - for both of which you need to be able to trust the bounce - are difficult while facing these bowlers. You have to tell yourself to be on the front foot, even if the length and pace are pushing you back, and also to play with a vertical bat as much as possible, to make up for the lack of bounce.
Then there's the rare breed of freakish actions, which take a while to make sense of. Remember Paul Adams and how he took the world by storm initially? He was bowling normal chinamen and wrong'uns but batsmen were hopelessly caught in the flurry of limbs. Such actions are a batsman's nightmare when you're up against them for the first time. Your brain will eventually find ways to look for certain nuances to decode the mystery. That's why it's important for these bowlers to keep evolving, because once the novelty wears off, they become easy pickings.
What if a bowler could read a batsman's mind - predict how a batsman would play before bowling a ball to him or having watched him play? Wouldn't it bolster his chances, give him leeway to plan, and buttress his skill?
Some may call it wishful thinking, others a secret science, but often just looking at the grip with which a batsman holds his bat tells you something about his preferences in terms of shots, and the way he stands may help you place your fielders.
Will a batsman be a good driver of the ball or more comfortable scoring off the back foot? Will he prefer scoring runs through the on side or the off? It's important to observe the finer nuances of a batsman's grip, stance and back-lift to size him up and plan accordingly. While it may seem utterly useless in this day and age of exhaustive analysis based on video footage, which is available to almost all professional teams, observation was one of the tools players relied heavily on in the past, and it continues to be useful.
The grip Most batsmen playing professional cricket hold the bat correctly with regard to the Vs made by thumbs and forefingers. The top hand is firmer and the V its thumb and forefinger makes opens out towards the outer edge of the bat, while the bottom hand plays only a supporting role.
A correct grip allows a proper downswing, which in turn enables a batsman to play the ball with the full face of the bat. The right grip is also imperative if you want to play the entire range of shots.
While the basics remain the same, lots of batsmen do enough with the grip to give some information away. For instance, Sanath Jayasuriya holds the bat close to the bottom of the handle, and Adam Gilchrist higher up. Now the coaching manual recommends that one holds the bat in the middle of the handle, but to say that successful players like these two don't hold the bat correctly would be grossly incorrect. While there are pros and cons to each approach, it all boils down to what suits your game best.
Holding the bat closer to the bottom gives you more control and helps you generate more power at the point of impact. In such cases, since the bottom hand becomes dominant very often, you don't need a high back-lift to hit the ball long and hard. That's why Jayasuriya is ever so good with his short-arm jabs. Such players generally are more comfortable on the back foot, and horizontal bat shots are their bread and butter. The flip side of holding the bat close to the base of the handle is that the arc of the downswing gets radically smaller, which in turn reduces the reach and makes driving off the front foot that much difficult. But some players are exceptions to this rule. Sachin Tendulkar holds the bat close to the bottom of the handle but has managed to overcome the shortcomings with ease.
On the contrary, Gilchrist's batting is built on the extension of the arms, and holding the bat high on the handle compliments the extension. With this grip, the arc of the downswing becomes bigger, and hence increases the reach of the batsman. Lower-order batsmen tend to prefer this grip to enhance their reach. That's how the phrase "using the long handle" was coined. The flip side of such a grip is that you may not have enough control and you have to rely on the downswing to generate power. Players with such grips prefer playing on the front foot and can also be a little circumspect against quick short-pitched bowling. Gilchrist, like Tendulkar, is an exception here.
Then there were those like Javed Miandad, who had a gap between the top and bottom hands. The textbook recommends keeping the hands close to each other on the handle, to ensure that they move in unison. Yet Miandad's grip allowed him to manoeuvre the bowling and milk it for singles, though he possibly sacrificed some fluency in the bargain.
The stance If the grip on the bat is the first giveaway, the manner in which a batsman stands is the second. While the coaching manual recommends the feet be about a shoulder span apart, lots of batsmen have toyed with different options to suit their game.
People who stand with their feet too close to each other are often good back-foot players and the ones with wider stances are generally stronger on the front foot. Here, too, there are snags: you lose some balance if both feet are too close, and too wide apart results in lack of foot movement.
A stance that's too side-on or too open-chested also tells you a bit about the strengths and weaknesses of a batsman. While you'd be suspect against inswingers if your stance is too side-on, you'd struggle against away-going deliveries if it is too open. Sachin Tendulkar's is the closest to what would be a perfect stance - though even he tended to lean too much towards the off side when he started.
The textbook recommends keeping the hands close to each other on the handle, to ensure that they move in unison. Yet Miandad's grip, with hands apart, allowed him to manoeuvre the bowling and milk it for singles
Even the way you take guard can give the bowler a pointer or two. Generally players who ask for a leg-stump guard are good on the off side, for they try to make room by staying beside the line. And the ones who ask for middle stump are good on the leg side, for their endeavour is to whip it through the leg side. It's not a hard-and-fast rule but any information is better than none at all.
If a batsman is falling over, with his head not in line with his toes - which is the case with a lot of batsmen - he will predominantly be an on-side player, but would still be susceptible to sharp, incoming deliveries. Also, the intended ground shots on the leg side will probably travel in the air for a while, and hence positioning a fielder at short midwicket comes in handy. Such a batsman would also be unsure of his off stump and hence might play balls that are meant to be left alone.
The back-lift The last clues before the ball is finally bowled come from the height of the back-lift and its arc. Ideally the bat should come down from somewhere between the off stump and first slip, to ensure that the bat moves straight in the downswing.
Players who bring the bat in from wider than second slip, like Rahul Dravid, need to make a loop at the top of the downswing, or else they will find it difficult to negotiate sharp incoming deliveries. Should they fail to make that loop, the bat won't come down straight, which means meeting the ball at an angle instead of straight on.
Batsmen with higher back-lifts find it difficult to deal with changes of pace, because with higher back-lifts it's tougher to pull out of a shot after committing. Also, there's always a possibility they will be late in bringing the bat down to keep yorkers out. Ergo, yorkers and slower ones might just do the trick.
Since players with short back-lifts, like Paul Collingwood and Andrew Symonds, don't have a reasonable downswing, they rely on the pace of the ball to generate power for their shots. They tend to struggle if the ball has no pace on it, so taking the pace off isn't a bad move against them. On the contrary, short back-lifts are almost ideal to keep yorkers out with.
If anyone has to think on his feet in cricket, it is the bowler. For it is he who initiates the action and everyone else reacts to what he delivers. Yet, these days he's the game's underdog, constantly at risk of being on the receiving end, and bound to follow a plan to render himself effective. Since video data isn't available to teams before they reach a certain level, most bowlers rely on observing the finer nuances of their opponents in order to strategise.
Former India opener Aakash Chopra is the author of Beyond the Blues, an account of the 2007-08 Ranji Trophy season. His website is here
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
Convinced
that the overwhelming weight of evidence favors a
negative verdict if the ICJ ever braved such an
initiative, ElBaradei then makes a case for the
International Criminal Tribunal to "investigate
whether this constitutes a war crime". (pg 87)
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