"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 moustachioled, deploying an assortment of sky-high lobs and skiddy, scudding deliveries with a glint in the eye,"
"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."
"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 len"
Franklyn Stephenson pioneered a deceptive slower delivery known as the moon ball by maintaining an unchanged run-up and bowling action while altering the ball's release so it left lightly from the fingertips and dipped sharply. Historical bowlers such as Bill Lockwood also used slower balls without changing their actions to deceive batters. Stephenson developed the moon ball in the Lancashire League after tiring nets led him to bowl off-spin and then mix pace within an off-spinner's action. Stephenson now runs a cricket academy in Barbados and is regarded as a modern pioneer of slower-ball bowling.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]