Opinion From cutters to knuckleballs, the evolution of the slower one in cricket

What are the varieties of slower balls?

The premise is simple — bowl slower than the bowler’s standard speed to beat the trained muscle memory and reflexes of a batsman. But its effective execution is complex and elusive.

Franklyn Stephenson, the West Indies quick hailed as its inventor in the late 1970s — even though Wisden recorded the England quick Bill Lockwood as possessing a “slower ball of sinful deceit” at the turn of the 19th century — released the ball like an off-cutter, the index and middle fingers working down the side of the ball so that the thumb passes over the top, generating backspin and sometimes prodigious “cut”.

He passed on the “prank”, as it was then called, to his Nottinghamshire teammate Chris Cairns and then county colleague Wasim Akram. Stephenson’s close friend, the legendary Malcolm Marshall, chiselled a leg-cutter variation of the slower ball.

Towards the end of the last century, the back-of-the-hand, split-finger, and cross-seamed assortments entered the game.

In this century, the proliferation of T20s saw further research and discoveries. The slow bouncer was devised, as was the knuckleball, where the ball is primarily held by the tip of the fingers with a heavy accent on the knuckles, derived from a technique used in softball.

How does the slower ball work?

A well-disguised slower ball is like a conjuror’s illusion. Its success lies in its masterful masquerade.

Everything about the bowler remains the same — the energy of run-up, load-up, the hand speed, the release, and the follow through. The batsman, looking to pick up the minutest clue from the bowler’s action and wrists, expects the ball to arrive at the standard speed of the bowler in question — around 90 mph if it’s Mitchell Starc and 85 mph if it is Deepak Chahar. His responses and instincts are honed to react to the leather sphere that reaches him in approximately 0.45 seconds after release by the bowler.

So when the speed is dramatically reduced, he has to stagger the response mechanism — which is more difficult when he is pre-determined to play a particular shot. He will be prone to losing balance, and may end up playing prematurely — to his doom. Even if he connects, the impact would likely be weak.

The amount of reduction of pace is important. A bowler who clocks 90 mph dropping to 70 mph creates more shock than an 80 mph-er dipping to 70. The more pace a bowler reduces, the more effective is the slower one likely to be.

What are the effects of the various kinds of slower balls?

The behaviour of slower balls vary depending on how they are designed.  But the purpose is always to bamboozle the batsman, whatever the grip or release.

* The cutter variants tend to stop at the batsmen, because of the tremendous backspin they create, and either cut away or into the right-handed batsman.

* The knuckleball, mastered by Zaheer Khan and passed on to a generation of Indian seamers, floats in the air like a harmless full toss before suddenly plunging.

Often the ball doesn’t deviate, as there is hardly any backspin, but sometimes it does — depending on the air flow around the stitches. The slow bouncer rises up like a fast bouncer, but arrives 10-15 mph slower.

* The back-of-the-hand slower one is released like a leg-spinner’s wrong ’un. The seam is upright and a lot of overspin is imparted, generating extra bounce. But it’s difficult to perfect and camouflage, because there is a noticeable change in the bowler’s wrist position. One of its rare perfectionists was Ian Harvey of Australia.

* The split-finger ones, wherein the ball is placed in the webbing between the forefinger and middle fingers, drop deviously late into batsmen as the loose grip slows the release.

* Another slower ball exponent, Brett Lee, held the ball deep in his palm so that he didn’t whip the ball as he did in his usual release. It meant the ball not only travelled slower than his regular thunderbolts, but also swerved and dipped.

Why is the slower ball used more commonly in T20s and Tests?

Some of the most famous slower balls have come in the longest version of the game. Cairns’ slower-ball yorker to Chris Read, Shoaib Akhtar’s corker to Sachin Tendulkar, Jasprit Bumrah’s curve ball to Shaun Marsh, or the Courtney Walsh “Dope Ball” to Graeme Thorpe are the stuff of slower-ball folklore.

And yet, it is a sparsely-used variation in red-ball cricket. On the other hand, barely an over passes by without a slower ball in T20s. This is because in T20s, batsmen tend to premeditate and commit themselves to shots early rather than playing the ball on merit and waiting for a bad ball to arrive.