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Is bowling really fast (90mph and over) natural or a learned skill?

Cric123

School Boy/Girl Captain
I have always wondered why Australia keeps producing quality high 80s-90mph bowlers whereas England rarely do. Matthew Wood is a nice change. Steve Finn was also destined to become a quality fast bowler before his setbacks. Is it something to do with coaching technique? Australia is renowned for having great coaching facilities and personnel at their national and state academies. To someone like Brett Lee, bowling very fast probably came naturally, which is isn't surprising because some people are naturally gifted at one thing or other and he happened to be blessed with the ability to bowl very fast which he then learned to hone. But could it also be the nature of pitches? Australia has always relied on quick bouncy tracks and therefore the need to bowl fast is an asset.
 
If you're comparing England to Australia, then a key difference is the first class scene. Australia has 6 first class teams. If someone wants to elevate past grade cricket, and become a professional cricketer, they need a point of difference. In County cricket, people are encouraged almost to slow down to get through the season's grind and have a longer career. Australians also rate pace bowling quite highly and encourage bowlers to bowl faster. In England, Jesse Ryder can open the bowling successfully in County Cricket. He cannot get away with that in NZ first class cricket even.

I'm not sure of the empirical examples but Cricket is Australia's national sport, and so if someone was good at Aussie Rules or Rugby League, they are more inclined to choose cricket over that sport.

Australia also has the best coaching academies in the world. These can be used to get another 5 mph out of a bowler, but far more importantly, can re-teach natural bowling actions to permit pace with less chance of injury. Damien Flemming, Dennis Lillee and so on are some of the greatest thinking bowlers and are available for cricketers to remodel their actions. If someone is less concerned about injury, they can bowl at higher levels of intensity. Furthermore, the National team is notorious for dropping bowlers who reduce their pace. That is an incentive to keep pace up.

Steve Finn beleives it is a myth that he has lost pace. He reckons he was never out and out fast.

The county cricket system does not seem to be conducive to excellence at the moment. Jeetan Patel as a Wisden Cricketer of the Year and your best spinner? That is not right. Also the quality of international imports into county cricket is diminishing. The IPL takes priority for a lot of cricketing talent. The Australian seam bowlers seem to go there as their first pick while some batsmen still head to English County Cricket. The West Indies are no longer so strong as to send the likes of Sylvester Clarke, Malcolm Marshall and co to the Counties for their winter. What talent they have chooses IPL first. This means that there is less cricketing intelligence of experienced international fast bowlers to help the younger English players out in the county system with their bowling actions, set the bench mark for performance or even for the younger guys to compete with.

I am less inclined to think why Australia continues to dominate seam bowling as to why the West Indies have gone off the boil. Jerome Holder looks good, but bowls well within himself for pace. Kemar Roach is very hot and cold for someone so talented and Jerome Taylor while bowling fast, well they'd swap him for Bishop, Patterson, Croft, Walsh, Ambrose or Garner. Are the Olympic athetics programmes stealing West Indian bowling talent?
 
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sledger

Spanish_Vicente
Captain Grumpy, it sounds like you may have played first class cricket before. Can you confirm/deny?
 

Red

The normal awards that everyone else has
It's because Australians are tough robust leather skinned sons of hard men and convicts, and we forged a great nation out of a desert continent with our bare hands and our sweat and blood, eating only meat, damper and drinking billy tea and hard liquor, while the English are genteel ponces who thought they ruled the world for a while because they owned boats but instead got all pasty and white and lethargic sitting in damp rooms drinking tepid tea and eating sugary cakes.

#theAshes
 

Dan

Hall of Fame Member
If you're comparing England to Australia, then a key difference is the first class scene. Australia has 6 first class teams. If someone wants to elevate past grade cricket, and become a professional cricketer, they need a point of difference. In County cricket, people are encouraged almost to slow down to get through the season's grind and have a longer career. Australians also rate pace bowling quite highly and encourage bowlers to bowl faster. In England, Jesse Ryder can open the bowling successfully in County Cricket. He cannot get away with that in NZ first class cricket even.

I'm not sure of the empirical examples but Cricket is Australia's national sport, and so if someone was good at Aussie Rules or Rugby League, they are more inclined to choose cricket over that sport.

Australia also has the best coaching academies in the world. These can be used to get another 5 mph out of a bowler, but far more importantly, can re-teach natural bowling actions to permit pace with less chance of injury. Damien Flemming, Dennis Lillee and so on are some of the greatest thinking bowlers and are available for cricketers to remodel their actions. If someone is less concerned about injury, they can bowl at higher levels of intensity. Furthermore, the National team is notorious for dropping bowlers who reduce their pace. That is an incentive to keep pace up.

Steve Finn beleives it is a myth that he has lost pace. He reckons he was never out and out fast.

The county cricket system does not seem to be conducive to excellence at the moment. Jeetan Patel as a Wisden Cricketer of the Year and your best spinner? That is not right. Also the quality of international imports into county cricket is diminishing. The IPL takes priority for a lot of cricketing talent. The Australian seam bowlers seem to go there as their first pick while some batsmen still head to English County Cricket. The West Indies are no longer so strong as to send the likes of Sylvester Clarke, Malcolm Marshall and co to the Counties for their winter. What talent they have chooses IPL first. This means that there is less cricketing intelligence of experienced international fast bowlers to help the younger English players out in the county system with their bowling actions, set the bench mark for performance or even for the younger guys to compete with.

I am less inclined to think why Australia continues to dominate seam bowling as to why the West Indies have gone off the boil. Jerome Holder looks good, but bowls well within himself for pace. Kemar Roach is very hot and cold for someone so talented and Jerome Taylor while bowling fast, well they'd swap him for Bishop, Patterson, Croft, Walsh, Ambrose or Garner. Are the Olympic athetics programmes stealing West Indian bowling talent?
Siddle aside, when has the bolded actually happened?

I mean, Glenn McGrath intentionally reduced his pace and got even more successful; the national team drops bowlers who don't perform, more so than it being anything actually related to pace.

Heck, Lillee himself cut his pace dramatically following injury. There was no 'incentive to keep pace up' for him, there was an incentive to keep performing irrespective of your pace.
 
Siddle aside, when has the bolded actually happened?

I mean, Glenn McGrath intentionally reduced his pace and got even more successful; the national team drops bowlers who don't perform, more so than it being anything actually related to pace.

Heck, Lillee himself cut his pace dramatically following injury. There was no 'incentive to keep pace up' for him, there was an incentive to keep performing irrespective of your pace.
I agree that DK Lillee cut his pace after his back injury. Do you know what that pace was?

In the 1974-75 Ashes series he and fellow quick Jeff Thomson formed on elf the most potent opening bowling combinations in Test cricket to steer Australia to an emphatic 4-1 victory. “Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust, if Thomson don’t get ya, Lillie must,” was the caption The Sunday Telegraph used. Even though he had cut his pace and length of run up , relying more on seam movement, Dennis bowling was still timed at 154.8km/h
So you concede Siddle as an exception? Do you know about Doug Bollinger's last test? Doug bowled a spell where some balls where his pace fell into the 120's. He was dropped never to play test cricket again. Geoff Lawson defended this by saying there was a northerly wind and it was 40 degrees. Other press releases were more scathing claiming that Bollinger lacked match fitness. Never played again.

Ben Hilfenhaus, the international seam bowler, was dropped by Tasmania this year for a "lack of pace". Lack of pace "dogged" his international career for Australia despite bowling regular spells with most balls over 140 kmh.

Stuart Clark. Please explain why Brett Lee, Mitchell Johnson and Peter Siddle (when bowling fast) and many other bowlers were preferred over Stuart Clark. Stuart Clark was thought to bowl too slow to be ideal despite his stellar record.

These are nice recent examples for you to dwell on. For the current crop it is indisputable:

One is pace. Darren Lehmann has said that the team’s preference is for bowlers who maintain a pace of about 140 kilometres. He feels that it’s necessary to be effective in Test cricket.
As for Glen McGrath:

http://www.espncricinfo.com/thestands/content/story/659331.html - Why Glen McGrath was faster than the speed gun, and further more:

http://www.deccanchronicle.com/150601/sports-cricket/article/%E2%80%98i-hate-seeing-guys-bowl-slower-get-little-bit-more-control%E2%80%99-says

Glenn McGrath says
Inaccuracy is just one of those things. I hate seeing guys bowl slower to get a little bit more control. Obviously you need control and that's how you build pressure and get wickets. But if you are slowing down to get that control, I am not a big fan. I would rather see the guys do a lot more work in the nets to get that control – target bowling,”
 
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Dan

Hall of Fame Member
So you concede Siddle as an exception? Do you know about Doug Bollinger's last test? Doug bowled a spell where some balls where his pace fell into the 120's. He was dropped never to play test cricket again. Geoff Lawson defended this by saying there was a northerly wind and it was 40 degrees. Other press releases were more scathing claiming that Bollinger lacked match fitness. Never played again.

Ben Hilfenhaus, the international seam bowler, was dropped by Tasmania this year for a "lack of pace". Lack of pace "dogged" his international career for Australia despite bowling regular spells with most balls over 140 kmh.

Stuart Clark. Please explain why Mitchell Johnson and Peter Siddle (when bowling fast) and many other bowlers were preferred over Stuart Clark. Stuart Clark was thought to bowl to slow to be ideal despite his stellar record.

These are nice recent examples for you to dwell on. For the current crop it is indisputable:

Bollinger's issues were a result off being stuck at the Champion's League up until a couple of days before the Test, so he had no prep, no match fitness and bowled appallingly. Then, iirc, he broke down injured and was never picked again. It wasn't "he isn't bowling 145, drop him" it was "he's bowling ****e and isn't fit, drop him" (which was harsh on Dougeh because the management was ****ing appalling around him and Huss for that India series).

Clark was never quite the same bowler when he returned from his elbow injury, and was befallen by the ever-present incompetent Hilditch-led selection panel that was in charge around that time. He wasn't dropped because he was too slow, he was dropped because he wasn't performing as well as they thought he could be, he was getting old, and Hilditch thought the other three to be the future of Australian fast bowling. It was insane, but it wasn't pace.

And yeah, so much mention of pace in Dan Marsh's rationale for dropping Hilfenhaus (tbf there is a passing reference in the Cricket Tas statement). Somehow I think it has more to do with his effectiveness (or lack thereof) -- I mean, Tasmania picked Luke Butterworth for years -- and incidentally a lack of incisiveness is the same rationale Lawson gave when calling for Hilfy's dropping in the 2010/11 Ashes:

''He's just bowling the same ball over and over through the whole series and that's not going to be successful in Test cricket, particularly when the opposition see you the whole series,'' Lawson said. ''They know what's coming and with Strauss and [Alastair] Cook batting so well you've got to come up with something a bit better than your normal stuff.


''The opposition have got very used to facing him, and he just doesn't have very much to go back to particularly when the wickets get a bit flatter. England will be enjoying facing him because they don't really think he's got a delivery up his sleeve that will surprise them.''

[...]
Criticised for bowling too often at a pedestrian pace, Hilfenhaus was noticeably more swift in that department, too, clocking only 14 balls under 140kph in his 14 overs yesterday. However, Lawson, a noted supporter of the overlooked NSW quick Doug Bollinger, remains unimpressed by what he says is a lack of variety in Hilfenhaus's output and a series return that at present does not justify selection beyond this Ashes finale.


''In a normal series if you got to the fifth Test and he has the statistics he had, then he shouldn't be playing. How can you take five wickets in four Test matches and still be playing?'' Lawson said. ''You're there to take wickets or at least create chances. He hasn't been particularly unlucky with a lot of things.
If a bowler is bowling 130-135km/h and is effective, the selectors aren't going to drop them. Yes, bowlers are typically more effective at 140+, so its unsurprising that guys like Hilfenhaus, Bollinger and Siddle were dropped once they slowed down. But it wasn't due to the pace in and of itself, it was due to their diminishing returns.

Lehmann likes 140+ as a rule, yes. But he's kinda blessed with about 15 guys capable of bowling 140+ to a very high standard. Jackson Bird still got a gig bowling mid-130s, because he performed.


Performance > speed as a factor in selection, even if speed sometimes does correlate to performance.
 

Dan

Hall of Fame Member
And I'm not going to bother with the Lillee pace thing; accuracy of speed measurements in the 1970s is a whole other debate, and one I utterly cbf having again.
 
No Dan, it was pace for Bollinger. Gloss it all you want. The selectors were furious he dipped into the 120 km/hs and claimed he was clearly not match fit else he would have bowled faster.

Likewise Clark was thought to bowl too slow, hence other bowlers were preferred and he was not given the same international opportunities after recovering from injury.

Hilfenhaus dropped from first class cricket even for a lack of pace.

Bird may have been given a go due to injuries, but not a serious contender for a regular place until he gets more pace despite a test average of 23.30.

Lehman did not just create this mandate of 140 km/h with some novel thinking. There would have been far more criticism if it was novel.

I agree that performance should be a greater criteria than pace. Stuart Clark was a champion that any other team would have played - bar maybe South Africa. Ever wondered how Shaun Pollocks career abruptly ended?

Pollock likely to be dropped for the first Test | Cricket | ESPN Cricinfo

Pollock likely to be dropped for the first Test


Slower subcontinental conditions have made the South African team management consider the dropping of their most senior bowler, Shaun Pollock © AFP
Shaun Pollock is likely to be dropped from the South Africa team for the first Test against Pakistan after the team management decided to rely on faster bowlers for matches on the subcontinental wickets.
"We have been speaking to Polly about bowling less on the subcontinent since we were in Ireland in June," Mickey Arthur, the South Africa coach, told News 24. "We feel the faster bowlers will get more assistance [from the wicket]."

Pollock averages 130kph to 135kph while Dale Steyn consistently bowls at speeds above 140kph and Makhaya Ntini also clocks 135kph and more. Between 1997, when he first toured the subcontinent, and 2006, Pollock has played 17 matches in the region and taken 60 wickets at 23.18 against the four sides - India (13), Pakistan (18), Bangladesh (7) and Sri Lanka (22). In comparison, Ntini has taken 28 wickets from 11 Tests at 39.42 between 2000 and 2006.
I edited above some nice stuff for you about McGrath's bowling and his views on bowlers slowing down for you to view.

If you find it hard to believe that Thommo bowled at 160kmh and Lillee at 154.8 kmh because of the 1970's measurement tools (speed cameras weren't they or were they radar?) then you're welcome to fly in the face of many batsmen's accounts of facing them as against other bowlers.
 
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JTemperance

Cricket Spectator
Australia have a good set of pace bowlers right now but I think only Starc regularly reaches and exceeds 90mph. Johnson bowled at a sustained high pace during the last Ashes to devastating effect and it's what he'll always be remembered for, but he's been dropping off since then.

Hazlewood looks the man most likely to be in the side for years and years, yet with bounce and accuracy as his primary assets.
 
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Red

The normal awards that everyone else has
I
No Dan, it was pace for Bollinger. Gloss it all you want. The selectors were furious he dipped into the 120 km/hs and claimed he was clearly not match fit else he would have bowled faster.

Likewise Clark was thought to bowl too slow, hence other bowlers were preferred and he was not given the same international opportunities after recovering from injury.

Hilfenhaus dropped from first class cricket even for a lack of pace.

Bird may have been given a go due to injuries, but not a serious contender for a regular place until he gets more pace despite a test average of 23.30.

Lehman did not just create this mandate of 140 km/h with some novel thinking. There would have been far more criticism if it was novel.

I agree that performance should be a greater criteria than pace. Stuart Clark was a champion that any other team would have played - bar maybe South Africa. Ever wondered how Shaun Pollocks career abruptly ended?

Pollock likely to be dropped for the first Test | Cricket | ESPN Cricinfo



I edited above some nice stuff for you about McGrath's bowling and his views on bowlers slowing down for you to view.

If you find it hard to believe that Thommo bowled at 160kmh and Lillee at 154.8 kmh because of the 1970's measurement tools (speed cameras weren't they or were they radar?) then you're welcome to fly in the face of many batsmen's accounts of facing them as against other bowlers.
Pretty sure everyone here will acknowledge that at some point fast bowlers lose pace and become less potent and are dropped/retire. If that's the point you're going to great lengths to make, I think your wasting your breath. We all know it.
 

Howe_zat

Audio File
Bowling 90+ is a natural skill. When I was a few days old and got out of the hospital for the first time, my dad immediately took me to net practise. Unfortunately I struggled to send down six 90mph deliveries in a row - to be honest it was a big ask just to land it on the pitch - and so my dad had to sit me down and talk about how I would never be an international fast bowler.
 
Bowling 90+ is a natural skill. When I was a few days old and got out of the hospital for the first time, my dad immediately took me to net practise. Unfortunately I struggled to send down six 90mph deliveries in a row - to be honest it was a big ask just to land it on the pitch - and so my dad had to sit me down and talk about how I would never be an international fast bowler.
You must have had a strong arm to miss the pitch.
 

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