The paceman’s round-arm delivery is steeped in the early development of cricket

By Martin Flanagan

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SRI Lankan paceman Lasith Malinga has solved – or at least clarified – one of the mysteries of cricket.

In Perth on Wednesday night, Malinga returned schoolboy figures of 6-7 for the Melbourne Stars in the Big Bash competition. If Twenty20 represents the future of the sport, Malinga is well placed, since he is said to be one of the best bowlers in the world in this form of the game.

The irony is that watching him bowl I finally gained some insight into the transition, which dramatically altered cricket between the 1820s and 1860s – that is, the transition from under-arm bowling to round-arm bowling to over-arm bowling.

With under-arm bowling, as I understand it, the ball was originally bowled along the ground. Hence, the early bats were shaped like hockey sticks. As work began to be put into preparing smoother playing surfaces, bowling in this manner became too predictable and bowlers began “lobbing” the ball and putting spin on it.

The changes in bowling technique were incremental but constant. By the 1820s, there were bowlers who found they could get more speed and variety by bowling round-arm, which was eventually legalised in 1835. In 1864, the search, by bowlers, for the next advantage – and the leeway given to them by umpires who were themselves former bowlers – led to over-arm bowling being legalised.
My scrutiny of this period arose from my interest in colonial sportsman Tom Wills. Wills’ ghost was summoned for me this week with

Hard to pick: Lasith Malinga shows his record-breaking style against the Perth Scorchers.

Shane Warne’s announcement that, at the age of 43, he was still up to Test cricket. In the same way, Wills’ epic confidence never faltered, notwithstanding the fact that his life off the sports field was largely consumed by alcohol and debt collectors.

Wills’ career pre-dated Test cricket, the big fixtures in his day being the intercolonial matches between Victoria and New South Wales. After 20 years of drinking and accumulated wear and tear to his body, there would still be regular calls for Wills to be returned to the Victorian team as captain. The difference, of course, is that whereas announcements of his return stirred up interest in the colony of Victoria, Warnie’s announcement was world news. That is another way that the sport has changed.

Wills was regarded in his day as an ugly bat, but he was courageous and a hard hitter of the ball. He regularly made runs but his special strength was as a bowler. He bowled under-arm, round-arm and over-arm, although the accounts of him bowling over-arm come from the period when it was illegal. In whatever game he played, Wills was always pushing for an advantage.

Having spent his childhood at Moyston, outside Ararat, Wills was sent to the Rugby school in England, arriving in 1850 just before his 15th birthday. He returned to Melbourne in 1856 and revolutionised sport in this colony and, indeed, in the country at large. Having led Victoria to its first victory over New South Wales in cricket, he was seized by the Melbourne Cricket Club and employed as club secretary and, in this capacity, he oversaw the sub-committee that wrote the first rules for Australian football.

Wills only had one way – his way – and he and the MCC committee soon fell out. In April 1860, Wills played cricket for Collingwood against his old club, Melbourne. The match report in The Argus was written by an MCC member who happened to be a journalist. He wrote that Wills’ bowling was unfair in two respects, because his bowling “was too high in the first place as well as bearing the closest possible affinity to a throw”.

Wills’ argument was that the umpire supplied by the MCC had not called him on either count. “What was the greater impropriety, my bowling high or otherwise, considering that I had an umpire to judge me, or the members and their friends bellowing like madmen, considering also they had no umpire to judge of them.” Wills’ escalating differences with the MCC led to a fist fight at a match eight months later.

However, what I struggled to understand was, first, how did any round-arm bowler control the direction of his delivery, and, second, while bowling round-arm, Wills periodically hit batsmen. How? This is where Malinga enters the story.

Nowadays, Malinga’s action is described as “slinging” but he is a classic round-arm bowler. In a Cricinfo interview in 2010, Malinga said he developed the action as a kid playing what he called “soft-ball” cricket. In that form of the game, as in Twenty20, the most effective ball was an in-swinging yorker.His action, in which his upper torso twists away at the moment of delivery while his arm bends back in the opposite direction, means his deliveries are naturally imparted with in-swing. For his bouncer, he raises his arm above his shoulder but not by much. He’s quick and hard to pick up. What an irony if this new form of the game led to the revival of an old form of bowling.

-TheAge

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