The Spin | Aiming for the moon: the rise of the slower ball, from Stephenson to Curran
Franklyn Stephenson’s throaty chuckle rolls down the phone line.“You know the hardest thing about bowling that ball? I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw how the batsmen were trying to play it! They’d be jabbing here or ducking there, most of them were so clueless!”Since the earliest days of cricket, bowlers have bamboozled batters with deceptive changes of pace.You can picture those old tricksters now, flannelled and moustachioed, deploying an assortment of sky-high lobs and skiddy, scudding deliveries with a glint in the eye, wreaking havoc on the wealds and downs of southern England.A couple of hundred years later, the Surrey and England bowler Bill Lockwood was said to possess a slower ball “of almost sinful deceit” at the turn of 20th century.Lockwood was hailed by Wisden’s Almanack as “one of the game’s first great fast bowlers” but could deploy his slower ball without any discernible change to his action.
This is a crucial factor in the deceptive alchemy of any slower delivery, as Stephenson attests.“You don’t change your action.I’m running in with my big, angry face, my arm swings over at the same speed but the ball comes out of the tip of my fingers, light as a feather, and then it dips, dips, dips.”Now in his mid-60s and running a successful cricket academy in his native Barbados, the former Nottinghamshire and Sussex all-rounder has his place in history as a modern pioneer of the slower ball.He first developed his “moon ball” while playing as an overseas professional for Rawtenstall in the Lancashire League in the 1980s.
Feeling tired at the end of a long net session he reverted to bowling off-spin but was displeased when the club batters started slogging him.This led him to occasionally slip a faster ball in with an off-spinner’s action.His “moon ball” came about as an inversion of this.“I could get it right in the blockhole or get it to turn quite sharply off a length,” recalls Stephenson.“Often the batters thought I was bowling a beamer at them and would wind up getting into all these awkward positions.
They really struggled.I knew I was on to something.”After honing the delivery for a few years in club cricket, Stephenson decided it was ready for use in the county game.In 1988 he took 125 wickets for Nottinghamshire and proudly states that “at least 25” of those were snared by his slowie.The advent of shorter-form cricket, particularly Twenty20, has prompted bowlers to build up an armoury of slower deliveries in order to compete with souped up bats, gym-sculpted batters, short boundaries and sixes falling like confetti around the globe.
Recently, Sam Curran has been noted for his use of slower balls for England and franchise sides around the world.Speaking to Stuart Broad on the For The Love of Cricket podcast, Curran explained the logic behind his varieties.“You have to be creative … I feel that if a batsmen knows I can do something unique it’s a bit like facing a mystery spinner, they’ve got a little bit more doubt.”Curran can effectively drop his pace in half, floating down maple-copter deliveries at 40mph in contrast to his average speed of 80mph.When it goes right, Curran’s moon ball is clipped up and shared on social media.
“Don’t get me wrong, it can get hit,” he also confessed to Broad.Notably, Curran didn’t attempt a slower ball when entrusted to bowl the final over of England’s nerve-jangling four-run victory over Nepal in their first fixture of the T20 World Cup in Mumbai on Sunday.Instead he bowled a series of full deliveries on leg stump with the field set accordingly.He succeeded in stemming the flow when it mattered most after his teammates had been sent around the park, Nepal’s middle order batter Lokesh Bam fully embracing nominative determinism by spanking the ball into various sections of the Wankhede stadium.Deciding when and when not to bowl the slower delivery is key.
Three of Bam’s sixes came off a trio of Jofra Archer’s slower balls in the 18th over,The former England and Leicestershire off-spinner turned sports psychologist Jeremy Snape is well-versed in both the physical and mental act of deploying the slower ball,“I got Virender Sehwag out with mine once in an ODI in 2002,He was caught in the deep, he stomped off and apparently was shouting afterwards: ‘I can’t believe I got out to one of Snape’s lollipops!’“It’s always a risky ball,It can easily go wrong and then that looks particularly bad in a high-stakes game played by a professional player.
‘Hang on a minute, why’s this elite cricketer bowling like the bloke from down the Dog and Duck CC?’”Curran’s moon ball has been compared to Snape’s own.As a serendipitous aside, Snape used to bunk with Curran’s dad, Kevin, on pre-season tours when both men were playing for Northamptonshire.“I actually texted Sammy a few months ago to say it looks like his is coming out beautifully.“Ultimately you’re trying to not only disrupt the clarity of thought and commitment of the batsman, you’re also trying to disrupt their power base and their core strength.T20 cricket is all about prediction for batsmen, they want to be able to predict the rhythm of your footfall and your delivery, ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum – smash! If you can upset that, break their patterns and predictions then you can have success, no matter how slow you bowl.
”Stephenson serves up one final paean to the slower ball with which he is synonymous all these years later,“There’s nothing better than outfoxing a batter, particularly when you do it in slow-motion so their humiliation seems to last for ever,”There’s a split second of silence on the phone line before a slow, deep laugh descends once more,This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin,To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions
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