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Sydney Barnes - The Bradman of Bowling?

Eds

International Debutant
Absolutely fantastic. Always love reading about Barnes. Top effort.
 

watson

Banned
Something else had happened in 1903. Barnes had finally perfected the leg break, a delivery that swung into the right handed batsman at pace before pitching and cutting away whilst rising sharply. No other bowler had mastered it before and none has been able to do so with any consistency since. Quite how he did it remains unclear although one theory goes that there was something freakish about the muscles in the fingers and wrist of his bowling hand. Certainly a number of his contemporaries commented that they were able to hear the snap of his fingers from mid-on or mid-off as he produced his most venomous deliveries. Neville Cardus christened the delivery the Barnes ball, but it appeared for some years that only club cricketers, minor county players and league professionals would be exposed to it.
Wow, so much spin delivered at such a pace. No wonder he picked up so many wickets so quickly.

Fabulous essay - thanks.
 

LongHopCassidy

International Captain
Tremendous article, although have come to expect nothing less from our Martin nowadays.

Massive tragedy for cricket that he refused to swallow his pride to play among uppity patricians and spent his glory days bashing sub-FC teams. So we can only speculate on the revs he put on the ball.
 

Migara

Cricketer Of The Year
Something else had happened in 1903. Barnes had finally perfected the leg break, a delivery that swung into the right handed batsman at pace before pitching and cutting away whilst rising sharply.
Not possible. must be a fast leg break that drifts in and dips and then spins away
 

wellAlbidarned

International Coach
It's possible to bowl inswingers which hit the seam pretty regularly, especially if you backspin the **** out of the ball like it sounds like Barnes did.
 

Spooony

Banned
Spin is the accessory after flight. Batsman get fooled by flight then spin takes them down when they are in two minds. You can bowl at 150km's hour the ball reach the batsman at around 80km's once it hit the pitch. Spin bowler is way to slow to beat a batsman by reflexes and if you get your flight wrong then the batsman do not lose sight if it and comfortable can choose to go forward or back. You can turn the on glass you will get played around easily because you will not fool anyone.

It's possible to bowl inswingers which hit the seam pretty regularly, especially if you backspin the **** out of the ball like it sounds like Barnes did.
Well that is swing bowling not spin and if the ball is bowled at a speed greater than about 85 mph, then the ball curves to the left.
 
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doesitmatter

U19 Cricketer
strange thing is when mid-off or mid-on could hear the finger snap while bowling the leg-break i am sure batsmen would have heard it too and should have known what is coming and play better but they didn't from the looks of it..may be he snapped for every ball
 
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Daemon

Request Your Custom Title Now!
Would've been called a dead ball in today's game for distracting the batsmen imo
 

Migara

Cricketer Of The Year
It's possible to bowl inswingers which hit the seam pretty regularly, especially if you backspin the **** out of the ball like it sounds like Barnes did.
Backspinners don't spin and jump. They just slides and deviates only little.

Example carrom ball vs doosra
 

a massive zebra

International Captain
Another great article as usual. :)

In the three matches against South Africa he was all but unplayable, taking 34 wickets at 8.29. The last act of his Test career came in the 1913/14 series in South africa, where he followed that performance up with an astonishing 49 wickets at 10.93. Without the redoubtable Taylor, who averaged over 50 despite his teammates travails, and had he not had to miss the final Test through injury, who knows what Barnes might have achieved.
I always thought he refused to play in the final test after a quarrel with the team management over their refusal to pay his wife's hotel expenses.

Barnes, who lived on into his 94th year, was still bowling at 80, and although I have never seen it there is film of him bowling at that age. Apparently it is included on a compilation video issued many years ago under the sponsorship of tobacco giant Benson and Hedges.
This, along with some more extensive clips of him bowling league cricket after the war, are shown on this video.
 
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Spooony

Banned
Hitting the seam makes it deviate. Backspinners and topspinners are used to fool the batsman with flight. ^What said up there agrees especially Anil Kumble would
 

Migara

Cricketer Of The Year
think a few blokes would disagree with you, hitting the seam definitely makes the ball jump.
Hitting the seam with pace, ball will bounce a lot yeah. But then it will not spin. If it swings then it has to be back spin. When it is back spin, it does not turn. And when it does not hit the seam (which is the most likely case) it will slide off the pitch. Simply spin and swing, does not occur together.
 

Migara

Cricketer Of The Year
The most likelihood is that Barnes bowled two kinds of deliveries off two grips. First one is the orthodox seamer. Since he was a strong man, would have been fast medium with the pace. Other one would have been the leg roller, which is rolled of the back of the hand to get some spin, but bowled with a medium pacers action (poor man's example is Chris Harris). Now this would have been lot slower than his seamer, but it's still possible to be little quicker than an orthodox spinner. Any batsman of substance, would have been able to pick the difference of pace if Barnes bowled the former in high pace. Being a shrewd operator, he would have bowled his seamers little slower, so the change of speed is not apparent. With new ball, he must have bowled close to full speed with swing and seam, with one or two leg rollers to intervene. When ball got older he would have gone to leg roller mode, and with slowed down seamer to make it un-noticable. One in a while he would have let it rip with full pace. I think the cricket vocabulary during Barnes' time was very poor, and what the writers meant with certain phrases may not be the same thing used today
 
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watson

Banned
The most likelihood is that Barnes bowled two kinds of deliveries off two grips. First one is the orthodox seamer. Since he was a strong man, would have been fast medium with the pace. Other one would have been the leg roller, which is rolled of the back of the hand to get some spin, but bowled with a medium pacers action (poor man's example is Chris Harris). Now this would have been lot slower than his seamer, but it's still possible to be little quicker than an orthodox spinner. Any batsman of substance, would have been able to pick the difference of pace if Barnes bowled the former in high pace. Being a shrewd operator, he would have bowled his seamers little slower, so the change of speed is not apparent. With new ball, he must have bowled close to full speed with swing and seam, with one or two leg rollers to intervene. When ball got older he would have gone to leg roller mode, and with slowed down seamer to make it un-noticable. One in a while he would have let it rip with full pace. I think the cricket vocabulary during Barnes' time was very poor, and what the writers meant with certain phrases may not be the same thing used today
I thought that Barnes combined finger spin (he flicked his third finger against the ball) with wrist-spin (he twisted his wrist as though he were 'unscrewing a light bulb') rather than bowl a mere 'leg-roller'. To perform this complicated procedure the ball would have to leave the front of the hand as the following photo and article imply;






....These days medium pace and spin bowling are two distinct schools, one incompatible with the other. But there has never been a more successful style of bowling than fast-medium spin, as purveyed by Barnes in particular. He was, John Arlott wrote, "a right-arm fast-medium bowler with the accuracy, spin and resource of a slow bowler".

Barnes, "square shouldered as a tailor's model" as Alan Ross put it in his poem, is said to be by men who saw them both to have been around the same speed as Alec Bedser, which suggests he was bowling between 70 and 80mph. These days Swann is reckoned to bowl quickly for a spinner, and his average speed is around 60mph. Barnes's stock delivery was a fast leg break that swerved one way in the air and then span back the other off the pitch. He married this with a fast off break that did the exact reverse, a ball he was taught by the Australian Monty Noble, another early master of spin-swerve bowling. Barnes's particular release meant that the two were difficult to distinguish. He did not unfurl the wrist for his leg break, but rather ****ed it backwards and rotated it, as though he was, as Rajan says, "unscrewing a light bulb". If you want a more technical explanation, you can find one in Bob Woolmer's Art and Science of Cricket.


This method brought Barnes 189 Test wickets at 16.43 each, and universal recognition from his contemporaries as the greatest bowler of his era. It was the swerve that did it, movement akin to the drift you still see now in good spin bowling, only faster through the air. But this was genuine spin bowling – Barnes was outraged when David Frith once had the temerity to ask him if he cut the ball? "'Cut it?' He glared, and again I wondered if he might hurl something at me. 'I spun the ball!'" The great Australian batsmen Clem Hill remembered how a "ball pitched outside my leg-stump, safe to the push off my pads, I thought. Before I could 'pick up' my bat, my off-stump was knocked silly".

The Spin | Rejoicing in the Twirlymen and the forgotten art of medium-paced spin | Andy Bull | Sport | guardian.co.uk
 
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