In praise of Twirlymen

‘I cannot approve of his recommending a young player to give a twist to his balls, for in the first place, there are a hundred chances against his accomplishing the art and ten hundred in favour of the practice spoiling his bowling altogether. John Nyren, Captain of Hambledon, some time in the 1770s.

Chortle. I do love old bits of cricket writing. Amol Rajan’s new book is full of little gems like this. It’s such a lovingly-compiled work. I savoured every page. That said, he’s preaching to the converted. To my mind there’s no better sight in cricket than a really good spinner, and no more enjoyable challenge for a batsman than facing one. 

It’s very rare, in England, that you get the opportunity. As Rajan makes clear, a combination of conditions (green tracks at most levels) and culture (even in the era of Swann and Panesar, spin is primarily seen as a defensive weapon by captains – Sean Udal said in an interview his first job was to make sure he didn’t go for runs and thereby just got to stay on) means that we are prone to producing flat, nagging John Embureys and Ashley Gileses, and at club level even less-adventurous clones. Much the same could be said of South Africa, of course, but why is it that Australia should have produced Benaud, Taylor, Warne and MacGill, while in a similar climate the best to come out was Pat Symcox and, for a brief while, Paul Adams? Conditions (slightly different soils, Benaud suggests) and more importantly culture.

It’s on this subject of culture that Rajan is at his best. He’s an assiduous historian of the game, but he’s a terrific cricket writer too: ‘What sort of a person spins things obsessively? What sort of a person wants nothing more, on seeing a sphere small enough to fit into one’s palm, than to send it twenty-two yards while making it fizz and twirl and spit and zip? Who chooses to immerse himself in a culture and a competition wherein the route to the prize is circuitous rather than direct? Only someone with a playful and excitable imagination. It’s impossible to devote time to spinning if you think of creativity as a chore…Deception requires imagination, but it also necessitates empathy, the ability to inhabit the mind of the batsman, and so calculate what he would least expect at any given moment.’

But spinning also requires stamina. It's no easy job. Never mind the doosra – newspapers of the 1930s declared the invention of the googly an abomination, just as the very idea you give the ball a ‘twist’ had been so abhorred by Nyren (though he was also fascinated by it). Many legal and cultural changes, it seems, have made their lives harder. They changed the rules so you couldn’t be out if it pitched outside leg (and fair enough, but how that must have changed the rules of engagement). They changed the rules so you couldn’t set a leg side trap with three behind square (I think it should be allowed for spinners). The bats got bigger, the boundaries smaller. Almost all spinners, it seems, go through their barren stage before they can step out into the light – Swann for years, Panesar now – even Warne wasn’t an unmitigated success at first. 

It’s why spinners often support each other. There’s a club. I particularly love this description of Warne: "'One of the most interesting nights of my life was at Abdul Qadir’s house when we sat on the floor and flipped an orange to each other with different grips and different forms of spin and discussed tactics and how to sum up batsmen". It’s a wonderful image: two spin-bowling greats, sitting on the floor in the sweltering heat of a Pakistan evening, needing nothing more than an orange to stimulate the sort of conversation that others would pay vast sums to hear, and each approaching the other with humility, knowing the thing about cricket, and especially about spin, is that you never stop learning.’

And this too: ‘Perhaps the most moving image is that of Sydney Barnes, the most complete of bowlers, and by then a dyspeptic old man, leading a blind Wilfred Rhodes – the greatest master of flight – around Lord’s in his ninety fifth year, Barnes acting as Rhodes’s eyes and ears.’

Spinners also require propaganda, however good they are. Warne boasted of having sixteen different deliveries ahead of an Ashes series. He claimed to dismiss Ian Bell with a perfect slider, when in fact it was just a leg break that didn’t grip. Saqlain Mushtaq, despite being the first to have really mastered the ‘doosra’, put it around that he had the ‘teesra’, which looked like a doosra but was in fact an off break. It was rubbish. And I love Rajan’s analysis of Ajantha Mendis’ claim to have developed a ‘new ball’ – ‘It contained a threat, not despite but because it was so utterly devoid of specifics.’ 

Beyond all this, the book is extremely good on the technical side - Rajan just missed out on a county spot as a kid. He may write, as he puts it, as an amateur, but I suspect he’s no mean practitioner himself. To analyse technique as he does you really have to be able to play a bit. One attribute of spin of which many commentators neglect is the fact that it’s a contest in three dimensions. You don’t just beat the batsman laterally – you have to beat him in the flight. You often hear crap club cricketers say things like ‘if you faced a Test spinner he’d be quicker than most of the seamers we face.’

It’s absolute nonsense and it does their skill a disservice. Most professional spinners might pack a devastating quicker ball, but without the capacity to deceive the batsman while bowling slowly they’d be no good. And that’s often reliant on degrees of over spin (if you want to make it dip quickly) or on a variation that gives the impression of overspin (Rajan’s particularly good on the development of the flipper - on how the thumb is surprisingly under-deployed in bowling, how the likes of W.G Grace made use of a similar delivery, and on how it might be the delivery which undergoes the next great revival). 

Rajan’s at his most magisterial on Warne – I suppose he had to be – in particular the comparison of him and MacGill is stunning. MacGill, he argues, had a huge-spinning leg-break, bigger than Warne’s, had a better-disguised googly (in fact Warne hardly had one at all), and could extract his turn more quickly through the air. On paper, MacGill held the aces. But what made Warne a better bowler was his relentless accuracy and ability to vary the overspin and sidespin so that the contest between bat and ball wasn’t just taking place on a lateral plane. Warne’s was a triumph of orthodoxy, not innovation. That’s probably why most cricketers, in their hearts, prefer him to Murali.

In a similar regard, he's brilliant on Jim Laker's haul at Old Trafford. He analyses Laker in large part by looking at the spinner at the other end, Tony Lock. Lock, a difficult character, left the field humiliated - on a turning pitch he'd managed one wicket to Laker's 19. It embodies their careers - the pair never got on, and it mostly appears to have been because Lock was always in Laker's shadow. The harder he tried to take a wicket, the less likely it was he'd take one. But the easier he made Laker's job.

What really makes the book is the research. As a cricket gimp I’d heard quite a few of the more well-known tales in here, but even so they were well worth revisiting, That said, every now and again I’d come across a little nugget that had me shaking my head. There is something in the spinner’s character, I think, which means that so many of these stories seem to end in tragedy, or in a calamitous falling out with the authorities, or with any number of other misdemeanours. I loved the little details - tiny things like:

- Don Bradman claimed to be more fearful of Headley Verity during Bodyline, and in fact it was Verity that topped the averages.

- Sonny Ramadhin moved to America in retirement, fostering scores of children and giving them a better life. 

- Clarrie Grimmett was well into his thirties when he moved to Prahran, put down a turf mat and practiced spinning the ball in his back yard, having trained his fox terrier to retrieve the balls six at a time.

- Richie Benaud would have had to stop bowling had he not paid for something in a chemist’s with his right hand (I shan’t go into details). 

It’s just a fantastic piece of work. Thank you, Mr Rajan.