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Cricket's Salman Rushdie

Some years ago, finding myself in the University of Delhi, I decided for old times' sake to peep into the cricket ground. A match was in progress: indeed , an innings had just commenced. The fielding side was walking in, followed by two batsmen in helmets.

I sat down to watch. The first over was a maiden. While his partner blocked, the non-striker commenced a series of strange exercises, now bending this way, now that. It took me a while to realise he was practising how to get of the way of the bouncing ball.

In the days when I played cricket in that lovely tree-ringed ground in Old Delhi, the non-striker practised strokes, not bobs and weaves. But then, we didn't know how to wear a helmet either. Watching the boy batsman ' duck' that morning was a powerful reminder of how, even in spin-saturated India, fast bowling has become the order of the day.

It began, of course, with Clive Lloyd and the West Indies. In 1976, Lloyd dispensed with the old-fashioned model of the 'balanced' bowling attack - two fast bowlers, two slow bowlers preferably of contrasting styles, one medium-pacer. The die was cast when, on a turning wicket in Port of Spain, India scored 406 for 4 to win a Test match. Three West Indian spinners were playing, and between them they took 2 wickets for 220 in 95 overs.

In the next Test, at Kingston, Lloyd insisted on four fast bowlers, who bounced and bowled the Indians into abject submission.

For the next ten years, the Caribbean reigned over the world of cricket, their dominance assured by a brat-pack of fastie-nasties, four men answering to different names but all bowling at a fearsome pace. Their captain had sworn that so long as he was in command, no slow slower would walk into a cricket field wearing West Indian colours.

There had, of course, been sides in the past that relied heavily on pace. But what was distinctive about Lloyd's model was the complete absence of variety. In D R Jardine's famous 'bodyline' side of 1932-'33, Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, the deadly opening bowlers, had as their counterpoint the able left-arm spinner Hedley Verity. The attack in Ian Chapell's great Australian team of the early seventies was spearheaded by Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, but the off-spin of Ashley Mallett and the leg-spin of Kerry O'Keefe always took crucial wickets. Clive Lloyd, however deliberately emphasized imbalance: fast, faster, fastest.

A student of the aesthetics of violence could distinguish between the members of the pack. Andy Roberts, he would tell you, bowled the outswing; Colin Croft, mostly the inswing. Holding was the fastest through the air, Garner had the highest arm action. But these fine discriminations were rarely made by the spectator, and certainly not by the batsman. The one had to watch, and the other to try to play, successive projectiles fired at ninety miles an hour.

To duck and weave was not, as with that fellow at the University ground, simply a matter of practice. It was quite often a question of life and death. Bones were now broken as frequently at the cricket as in Formula One motor racing.

It is useful to recall that when Clive Lloyd's attack operated there were no restrictions on the number of bouncers per over. Opposing batsmen were pinned to the back foot. After four or five short ones would come the sucker punch, the fast full delivery which was dragged on to the stumps or edged into the slips.

And if one snicked a ball, one knew one was out. The bowlers had as accomplices a quartet of outstanding close catchers: Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Joel Garner, and Lloyd himself.

The West Indians took this formula over into one-day cricket, again with conspicuous success. Four speedsters and a medium-pacer, along with the batting genius of Richards and company, assured them easy victories in the World Cups of 1975 and 1979. It was now being confidently said, wherever cricket was played, that in both versions of the game the role of the spinner would henceforth be marginal or non-existent.

Others sides tried to emulate the model worked out by Lloyd. Indians, with their characteristic delay, set about establishing pace academies. In 1991, at the Sydney Cricket Ground, the land of Mankad and Chandrasekhar even went into a Test match with four specialist seam bowlers and not one spinner.

Curiously enough, the Sydney Test in which India did not play a slow bowlers also marked the debut, on the other side, of one Shane Keith Warne. It is Shane Warne who, more than anyone else, has since challenged the supremacy of fast bowling. Through his craft and his example, he has reasserted the claims of tradition. He has restored the art of slow bowling to its rightful place.

True, even in the West Indian heyday there were some parts of the world, notably the Indian sub-continent, where spinners were still capable of winning the odd Test. Yet it has been Shane Warne's singular achievement to make people believe that slow bowlers can win cricket matches regardless of where or against whom they are played.

I like to think of Warne as cricket's Salman Rushdie. Like that Anglo-Indo-Pakistani, Warne is greatly gifted and knows it. As with Rushdie, we forgive him his arrogance for the beauty he has unfolded before us. But the comparison makes sense only if we see them as trend-setters, as opening the gate for others to follow.

After Rushdie came Seth, Ghosh, Mistry, Roy. He made it possible for an Indian writer in English to take by storm the global marketplace.

After Warne have come Anil Kumble, Mushtaq Ahmed, Paul Strang, Paul Adams. The leg-spinner, once reckoned to be an extravagantly risky proposition, has been shown to be devastating in the Test arena and restrictive in the limited-overs game. Who would have thought, when Lloyd's fast bowlers wee carrying all before them, that two leg-spinners, Warne and Kumble, would come to be regarded as the most reliable bowlers in the dying overs of an innings?

The remarkable resurgence of leg-break bowling can best be explained through another analogy, this time from the history of epidemics. Now, it is well-known that if a disease has been wiped out from a certain area, human beings lose their immunity to it. If by chance the disease returns, thus, its effects are deadly.

Similarly, over the years, as fast bowlers had relegated spinners, and especially wrist-spinners, to the uncompetitive world of club cricket, high class batsmen forgot what they were about. They had, so say, lost the gene resistant to the leg-break and the googly. Thus, once Warne brought back the disease (which it indeed was, from the batsman's viewpoint), it claimed many fatal victims.

The thesis is confirmed by the fact that Indians and Pakistanis play Warne better than anyone else. For here, leg-spin continued to retain a presence in first-class cricket -- the disease was not entirely eradicated. Salim Malik and Sachin Tendulkar grew up playing wrist-spinners in the Quaid-e-Azam and Ranji Trophies. They had been repeatedly inoculated against its effects, and could handle Warne as easily as they handled Abdul Qadir or Narendra Hirwani.

The bowling history of the past quarter-century thus divides itself into two phases: a fast-bowling revolution followed by a slow-bowing reaction.

An innovation independent of either phase is the development of the 'slower' ball. New ball bowlers had been known, in the past, to throw in the odd slower one. This was done causally, by way of variety, but with little attempt at systematic deception. The elsewhere ball, as we know it, is a distinctive contribution of one-day game. Some, like Steve Waugh, send it as an off-break, the ball placed deep in the palm. Others, like Venkatesh Prasad, bowl it as a leg-beak, rolling the fingers over the seam.

Change of pace works to deadly effect when one knows the batsman is on the attack, seeking to score in fours of sixes. Which is why the slower ball is brought into play early in the innings, when the field is up, or very late, when the slog is on.

Let me, in conclusion, note two ironies. First, Clive Lloyd's cousin and early hero was Lance Gibbs, the off-break bowler who took 309 Test wickets. Second, when the West Indies defeated England last winter, a more-than-modest role was played by the young leg-spinner Dinanath Ramnarine.

And the supreme irony was that Clive Lloyd -- that apostle of the fast, faster, fastest theory -- was manager of the victorious team of last winter, the one Ramnarine was part of.

As they used to say in Yorkshire, cricket is indeed a 'foony' game.

Ramachandra Guha