Leg-spin bowling-puzzling riddle of cricket

By A. C. De Silva

CRICKET: Leg spin bowling is the puzzling riddle of modern cricket. It is still a surprise packet, as it was in the year after that grateful Oxford University and Middlesex batsman, B.J.S. Bosanquet invented the googly, Whilst others like the three South Africans, Schwarz, Pegler and Faulkner worked to perfect its baffling qualities.

The problem with leg spin is that cricket and especially one-day cricket rapidly becoming its most popular manifestation, is too serious a business for surprise packets.

To include a leg-spinner as one of five bowlers in a cup match would look today like an April Fool's Day joke.

In the 1930s legspin was as fashionable in first class cricket as helmets are for batsmen subjected to allout physical assault. Few county sides would take the field without them. Yorkshire was one of the exceptions. Not for it the twiddky stuff served up by soft southerners. Hence, Yorkshire batsmen's weakness against such bowling. Only Sutcliffe, Hutton and Boycott have ever been able to play it consistently and well.

In Kent, the legspin tradition was as strongly rooted as that for providing England with great wicket-keepers. The root was Tich Freeman who teased and tormented second line players with his slight and spin. The very greatest could take him to pieces because their footwork could take them to the pitch of the ball.

When the young Douglas Wright appeared as his successor, it was manna from heaven because here was a bowler with the same power of spin as Freedman, a quite astonishing command of both the legspin and googly which he could deliver at a pace for too brisk for any batsman to come down the wicket, even if he was wearing his dancing shoes.

Wright - affection of all

At 24 Wright went into the England side against Australia. He was 42 when he began his last season and retired with 34 England caps, the captaincy of his county, 2,056 wickets at just under 24 apiece. and the universal affection of everyone in the game for one of the nicest men ever to pull on the white flannels.

Don Bradman thought he was a wonderful bowler. So he was, technically, but Bradman and the Australians have been known to talk bowlers into sides - Wright was more or less - 'murdered' in Australia. Certainty the war years took out the best of his cricketing life, the years when fingers and back were supple enough to develop wrist spin at a pace hitherto unseen.

But at the end of such a bounding and whirling action, total control was well nigh impossible. Wright tended to bowl at least one bad ball an over.

Four runs to a Test player worth his place. Why not wait, therefore, for the bad ball and flay it? The good ones could be attacked with a dead bat whilst the scoreboard was kept ticking onwards.

Thus, in his way, Wright was negatively responsible for the fashion change which saw England teams going into the filed with finger spinners, accurate bowlers in the Rhodes, Jack White, variety tradition, sometimes to the point where there were two off- spinners and two left-handlers in the same eleven.

That, too, was a second-best alternative and it is incidentally one repeated in Australia's winter tour over thirty years ago when Miller and Emburey, the two off-spinners, both played in the Test team. Coming over India, there have been times in India's heyday when four tweackers spun their deadly webs when Chandrasekhar was left out in favour of the finger spinners. Sometimes his omission was due to an alleged less of form and coincidence. Whether such a loss is ever visible as a factor over a period seems somewhat doubtful.

A touch bowler never knows when he is going to turn in a deadly spell. Like Wright, Bhagawat Chandrasekhar has never struck as a temperamental bowler, though clearly with all wrist spinners, there are times when they are not sure where the ball is going: they can be all over the place.

Chandra - more reliable

To close followers of cricket, Chandra has always seemed more reliable than most of his kind because of his paralysis there is a limit to the strength he can build into his lesser right arm. In a way this must have helped since it was anatomically improbable that he could press for added effect which can often be the route to disaster for these bowling with their naturally stronger arm.

Further more because, unlike Wright, Chandra is not a great spinner from leg, his margin for error has never been as small. The topspinner and googly delivered high and fast which have given him the deadly bounce which batsmen fear is so much easier to control and to pitch accurately. Many of the alleged let-spin and googly bowlers of the 1930's lost the leg-break in their maturity so that they bowled only googlies and top spinners.

One such bowler was Ian Peebles. Chandra's angle of turn could always be seen from his field which featured the same catches as did such great deeds for the off-spinners. Solkar was the ace in that royal straight.

Chandra has had two other advantages which Wright lacked. He has had the pitches on which to bowl.

Indian wickets respond to the spin ball delivery quickly: There is that degree of holding in many pitches which can make the ball do the talking rather that the bat. Chandrasekhar has played in 58 Tests and bowled 15,963 deliveries with 585 maidens. He gave away 7,199 runs and captured 242 Test wickets, averaging 29.42.

In England too many pitches were to slow for Wright: Again the margin of error which he needed was missing. Above all, Chandra bowled in a climate of spin; Wright operated as a longer, almost an eccentric bowler, whereas Chandra has been able to integrate into the finest band of bowling brothers that the cricketing public have been able to see.

Kent, Wright's county, is the home of the band of BrothersClub, a famous old cricketing institution. But when Davy Wright himself an established feature of the cricketing scene for about a quarter of a century passed from the scene there was no one in sight to take his place.