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.
Conan Doyle’s early trendsetter
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a fan of the slower ball. Or at least the lob. In October 1928, the Sherlock Holmes creator wrote The Story of Spedegue’s Dropper in The Strand Magazine. No doubt influenced by the lesser seen “lobsters” such as George Simpson-Hayward or Digby Jephson, who tossed the ball up with gleeful abandon in the days preceding the first world war, Conan Doyle’s tale focuses on a young man named Thomas Spedegue.
Cursed with asthma and palpitations, young Spedegue takes to the New Forest to develop a bowling technique called the dropper. A ball is lobbed high into the air only for it to crash sharply down on to the stumps. Safe to say Conan Doyle’s story was set at a time long before modern no-ball laws that forbid any ball from reaching the batter above waist height. Also, never let an MCC Law get in the way of a good story.
“I said to myself that Nature had handicapped me with a weak heart, but not with a weak brain and that I might think out some new thing which was within the compass of my strength. Droppers, I call them. Spedegue’s droppers – that’s the name they may have some day.”
Spedegue is discovered by a former cricketer named Walter Scougall, who after initial scepticism is impressed enough to arrange for Tom to play in a match … he is eventually called up to play for England and picked to take on the mighty Australians. You probably don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to predict where the story goes from there, though Conan Doyle can’t resist a sting in the tale.
Quote of the week
“Having fallen in love with the game in a quite different era from the one we are in now, my goals as an administrator have been firmly rooted in making cricket more equal for women and girls. For it to be as normal for a girl to pick up a cricket bat as a boy. For a young woman to know – not just dream – that she can become a professional cricketer” – Clare Connor announces she is leaving the England and Wales Cricket Board after 18 years during which she has overseen the growth of women’s cricket into a professional sport and helped introduce the first central contracts in the women’s game.
Memory lane
“When Cairns ran up I assumed he hadn’t let go off the ball. Then something in my subconscious thought I needed to protect myself and I ended up looking pretty stupid. The first thing I can remember is the soft thud before it hit the stumps. I was more shocked than anything.”
Chris Read was the victim of one of the most famous slower balls in cricket, delivered by New Zealand’s Chris Cairns during the Lord’s Test of 1999. Who had schooled Cairns in the ways of the slower delivery? C’mon Sherlock! Cairns joined Nottinghamshire on a youth scholarship as an 18-year-old in 1988 and found himself bunking in a West Bridgford flat with … Franklyn Stephenson.
“Chris would ask me about the slower ball and I was happy to show him and give him some pointers,” says Stephenson. Read probably wishes Cairns had found digs somewhere else. Read played 15 Tests for England but is unfortunately still most remembered for that one extremely slow death.
Still want more?
Pakistan have agreed to play their T20 World Cup match against India after all, having previously been told by their government to boycott it, after a last-minute agreement.
Simon Burnton on England and the art of winning ugly.
And Australia have some form and fitness worries going into the tournament, writes Martin Pegan.
… by writing to james.wallace.freelance@theguardian.com
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