Change bowlers

THERE will be many among my readers who know as well as their mother's name, Don Bradman's highest Test score, the number of centuries he hit, his aggregate of runs and his average. But how many can recall how many wickets he took in Test cricket? There were two in all, and one of these was of a fellow master. Towards the end of the third day's play in the Adelaide Test of 1932-33, he was brought on to bowl by his captain, W. M. Woodfull. Walter Hammond was batting on 85, and 20 minutes remained until stumps. In his first over, Bradman sent down a slow loping full toss which Hammond took a swipe at, missed, and was bowled.

The last overs of the day, an unfamiliar bowler, the prospect of easy pickings, an ill-chosen stroke - and a match is turned on its head. This is one of the endlessly repeated, and endlessly fascinating, set-pieces of international cricket. The actor at its centre, the change bowler, must surely be the least written about of all cricketing characters.

Change bowlers are essentially of two types - slow medium swing bowlers and erratic spinners. In contemporary cricket, exemplars of the first kind are Hansie Cronje and Saurav Ganguly. Neither bowl enough, or well enough, to qualify as genuine all-rounders. They lack the pace and the control to bowl long spells or to run through a side. But when the sky is overcast, or the regular bowlers are tired or ineffective, they might come on to bowl. At first a series of curving out swingers, at a gentle pace and off a six step run, are all allowed to pass through without interference. But a ball fuller in length provokes a fatal indecision. The resolve not to be greedy is vanquished, temporarily, by the sight of that lovely gap between cover and extra cover. The batsman moves, belatedly, to drive. However, the split second delay means that the ball is not met by the bat's middle but catches the edge, to be taken safely at slip. A partnership is broken and the change bowler retreats to the outfield, to make way for the regulars.

Past practitioners of this ilk were the New Zealander Bevan Congdon and the Australian Douglas Walters. Both were in the side as batsmen; their main assignment the scoring of centuries and half centuries. Both could, however, swing the ball at medium pace, swing it late and to occasional deadly effect. So could that genially moustachioed opening batsman Graham Gooch. But a change bowler Indians have a special reason to remember was the Pakistani Mudassar Nazar.

I remember watching, on television, a Test being played at Lahore that we had more or less saved. G. R. Viswanath and Dilip Vengsarkar, world class batsmen both, were set, India were 80 runs in front, and only three hours remained till the end of the match. Mudassar now sent down a wide long hop - Vishy decided, late, to cut it for four, and dragged it on to his off stump. In his next over, Mudassar had Vengsarkar caught behind the wicket off a lovely late out swinger. That indeed is the general pattern, that the part-timer gets his wickets with balls both beautiful and absurd. On this occasion, after Mudassar had done his two-card trick the Indian tail caved in, and Pakistan had time to make the 118 it needed to win.

The second type of change bowler is the slow spinner. Once again, these have not the consistency to bowl 10 overs on the trot. A full toss or a long hop is guaranteed to appear every six balls or so. But so might a low grubber that shoots along the ground, or a sharp turner that deviates a full 12 inches after pitching. Among the bowlers of this type have been the former Australian captain, Ian Chappell, and the Guyanese opener-cum-chinaman bowler, Roy Fredericks. Among players currently in the game, England's Mark Waugh and our own Vijay Bharadwaj would come into this category.

Yet a third type consists of those whose reputation greatly exceeds their ability. It is striking how effective, as bowlers, some of the game's greatest batsmen have been.

Consider, for instance, Vivian Richards and Allan Border, who would be on anyone's short list of the finest batsmen in modern cricket history. Their bowling skills, by contrast, were meagre. Both pretended to be finger spinners, but neither could (on a decent wicket) turn the ball more than an inch. Neither had a puzzling flight, or a well concealed change of pace, or zip off the wicket either. In sum, they each lacked all the attributes of a wicket-taking slow bowler. Yet the number of wickets both took (in Test as well as one-day cricket) was quite out of proportion to the talents given them by the God of Bowlers. The explanation lies not in science but in psychology. For when they came on to bowl they brought with them their awesome reputations as batsmen, captains and cricketers. The novice Test player, especially, would have his resolve tested by the sight of Richards or Border with the ball.

Something of this kind also explains Sachin Tendulkar's curious successes at the bowling crease. True, he can bowl the lot - inswing, outswing, off break, leg break, the googly. But he bowls them so slowly and with such lack of control that even a decent schoolboy batsman would back himself to safely milk him for four runs an over. That he gets wickets at all is to be explained, I think, by his name and his iconic status.

Before Richards, Border and Tendulkar, there was a man named W. G. Grace. Grace scored 54,896 runs and hit 126 centuries in first-class cricket and remarkably, took 2,876 wickets too. He founded modern batsmanship - he was the first to play back as well as forward, to elaborate a proper defensive technique, to score effectively all round the wicket. As K. S. Ranjitsinhji so beautifully put it in The Jubilee Book Of Cricket, Grace was "the maker of modern batting. He turned the old-one-stringed instrument into the many-chorded lyre". His bowling technique, however, was crude and simple - he ambled four steps and sent down round arm lobs. But he was W. G. Grace, and the batsman was always reminded of this. And the Old Man was not above the use of uncricket-like methods. It is said that before starting his over he would ask the batsman if he had seen the flock of geese flying overhead. The man would look up, be dazzled by the sun, whose rays still danced around his eyes while he faced W. G.'s first ball.

Possibly the most innocent of all bowling irregulars in history was an English monarch, King George V. In Don Bradman's annus mirabilis, 1930, the King visited Lord's, as was the custom, at tea on the second day of the Test. Bradman and Bill Ponsford were at crease, having already put on 231 runs together. The two teams were introduced to the King at tea-time, and in the first over after the interval Ponsford was dismissed. The next year, when the New Zealanders were touring, a visiting batsman likewise got out after tea on the Saturday of the Lord's Test. For the rest of his reign, King George V was known as

"England's best change bowler". In the present parlous state of their cricket, the English can do worse than pray for a monarch who would do likewise.

RAMACHANDRA GUHA

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