Leg Spin :-
As I mentioned earlier, wrist spin (mainly right arm leg spin) came later to the game than finger spin. The difficulty to control line and length made the art a les profitable on but there was another very important reason for that.
Bowling progressed from under arm to over arm in stages. In the first stage of over arm bowling, the arm and hand could not be raised above shoulder height. This meant that the action was a super exaggerated version of what Malinga has in so far as the hand was close to three feet away, horizontally from the shoulder. So much was over the shoulder bowling looked down upon that the terms throw or jerk were first used for bowling which we now understand as the only legitimate bowling, viz, overarm with arm above shoulder height. This was compounded with the lbw law.
Right arm leg breaks would not have been very attractive
As arms started getting straighter and higher, the faster bowlers started using the leg break as a weapon most famously the legendary Barnes. However flighted slow leg spin remained relatively behind the scenes till a Middlesex and England amateur
"introduced into cricket the three-card-trick or the thimble-and-pea trick"
The English call Bernard, James Tindall Bosanquet's this mind-boggling invention of the turn of the century, the googly but the Australian name for it is 'bosey' in deference to "
the man who first worked this big bluff on batsmen from both countries", Bernard James Tindall Bosanquet.
Starting with a table tennis ball on a dinner table, Bosanquet found that he could spin the ball from off to leg with a leg break action. Amid ridicule, laughs and jeers from his contemporaries, Bosanquet developed the delivery to the extent that he could bowl it with success in the first class game. But as AG Moyes writes,
"the illegitimate member of the leg-break family . . . was just as uncontrollable as most delinquents . . . the first victim to it was stumped off one that bounced four times" Mailey is supposed to have yorked a Victorian batsman at the SCG off the third bounce !
While it was an Englishman who introduced the world to the devilry of the bosie, it was a trio of South Africans who 'commercialised' it, as it were, on the world stage. Between the home series against England in 1905-06 to the Triangular in England (Australia being the third team), Aubrey Faulkner, Reginald Schwarz and Albert Vogler claimed 201 Australian and English wickets in just 24 Test matches.
Code:
[B]Year and Series Tests Wkts 5w 10w Avg S/R[/B]
1905-1906 SAF v ENG 5 41 0 0 19.1 47.7
1907 ENG v SAF 3 36 2 0 19.6 44.2
1909-1910 SAF v ENG 5 65 6 1 22.3 40.8
1910-1911 AUS v SAF 5 39 2 0 34.4 50.7
1912 Triangular Series 6 20 1 0 34.2 67.3
[B]Combined Total 24 201 11 1 24.7 47.3[/B]
As can be seen from those figures the magic of the leg break/googly bowler was wearing thin by the second decade of the 20th century and then in 1914 came WWI. When the world returned to cricket after the war, a new breed of leg spin bowlers was being bred in another part of the Southern hemisphere albeit half way around the world, in Australia
Mailey, Grimmett and O'Rielly took the art of leg-break googly bowling, at the highest level, to a completely different plain. That they were all Australians, was not a coincidence. The bouncy hard wickets of Australia were ideal for the true purveyor of this new and deadly form of bowling and the Australians mastered it and have continued to produce world beaters till this day.
However, with the changing surfaces in Australia, the productivity in the leg-spin factory down-under has dropped with the gap between Benaud in the 50's and sixties and Shane Warne nearly half a century later, being telling. The intervening period was again taken up by the two emerging giants of the sub-continent who in the last half century have provided the world with Gupte, Chandra, Wadir, Mushtaq and Kumble.
Here are the leg spinners of the world who satisfy our criteria listed in chronological order
Code:
[B]Country Player Span Mat Wkts[/B]
[B][COLOR="DarkGreen"]SAF GA Faulkner 1906-1924 25 101[/COLOR]
[COLOR="DarkOrange"]AUS AA Mailey 1920-1926 21 118
AUS CV Grimmett 1925-1936 37 127
AUS WJ O'Reilly 1932-1946 27 100[/COLOR]
[COLOR="RoyalBlue"]IND SP Gupte 1951-1961 36 144[/COLOR]
[COLOR="DarkOrange"]AUS R Benaud 1952-1964 63 102[/COLOR]
[COLOR="RoyalBlue"]IND Chandrasekhar 1964-1979 58 193[/COLOR]
[COLOR="SeaGreen"]PAK Abdul Qadir 1977-1990 67 174
PAK Mushtaq Ahmed 1990-2003 52 153[/COLOR]
[COLOR="RoyalBlue"]IND A Kumble 1990-2008 132 122[/COLOR]
[COLOR="DarkOrange"]AUS SK Warne 1992-2007 145 297
AUS SCG MacGill 1998-2008 44 159[/COLOR]
[COLOR="DarkGreen"]SAF PR Adams 1995-2004 45 134[/COLOR]
[COLOR="SeaGreen"]PAK Danish Kaneria 2000-2010 61 212[/COLOR][/B]
Once again it is clear that the surface determines the type of spinner. No Englishman has prospered long enough to make a mark at the highest level although in Wright they had a unique but highly expensive and difficult to manage bowler and in Freeman another who, at least at the first class level, had figures that were Bradmanesque if such a word could be used for a bowler.
South Africa fell away once the batsmen in the world found that, if you were to survive at the top, you had to be able to read the 'wrong one' and the best could. The other countries just did not produce bowlers of test class. There is no reason other than conditions for bowling to explain this. The second wrist spinner from South Africa who appears in the last era was Paul Adams whose USP was his action rather than the fact that he was a left handed wrist spinner. Most countries played him better after the first series except England who took three series to work him out :o)
Here are the the three countries that have produced leg spinners who qualify for our list . . .
Code:
[B]Era/Decades AUS PAK IND SAF[/B]
19th century
1900's-10's 1
1920's-30's 3
1940's-60's 3 1
1970's-80's 1 1
1990's-00's 2 2 1
[B]TOTAL FS 6 3 3 1
Tests 750 369 468 374[/B]
[B][COLOR="DarkRed"]Factor 0.80 0.81 0.64 0.27[/COLOR][/B]
Before we move away from spinners, I would like to come back to something I mentioned at the start of this article - that physical attributes determine what kind of bowlers an ethnic community produces. The fact that Australia produces leg spinners does not have to do with the physical attributes of Australians but that they produce fast bowers does. So while they produce leg spinners since the conditions help (still to an extent) the combination of conditions and physical attributes makes it an even bigger nursery for fast bowlers.
In the West Indies on the other hand, the fact that the best physical specimen were brought in those ships for the terrible purpose of selling them into centuries of slavery meant that those who survived the ordeal of the journeys had the potential to produce sportsmen in the most physically demanding of sporting ventures. Hence the American-African community produces sprinters after world beating sprinters while those whose ancesters were not considered strobg enough to be taken on those terrible ships, produce long distance runners. In West Indies, thanks to the English colonisation of so long, cricket attracted them and they produced some of the game's most ferocious fast bowlers. The Indian community, brought to the plantations of the Caribbean continues to find spin bowling to be a better way to try and make it to the top. The fact that conditions do not really encourage spinners has meant that not many have been able to emulate Ramadhin.
In the sub-continent, the evidence is strongest of this ethnic element to explain why Pakistan produces fast bowlers and India does not. I have mentioned it here before and some, mostly Indian friends, have disagreed. But the fact remains that when the country got partitioned, the areas which produced the biggest men, physically, mostly were in the North west of the country and hence went to what was then known as West Pakistan which is why a stream of fast bowlers continues to come from the west Punjab and the North western areas.
Before partition the fastest of Indian bowlers, at the domestic level as well, were players like Nissar, Khan Mohammad, Jehangir Khan etc. After partition we struggled to produce fast bowlers.
to be continued . . .
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