“There are various ways of doing this. One is to increase the length or speed of your run. It is a plain truth that the pace of the ball depends on the run, as well as on the swing of the arm; as can be verified by observing the impetus given to projectiles thrown from a railway-carriage window. Now the pace of the run up to the crease before the ball leaves the hand is of small importance; the difference depends on the ball being propelled by a body in fast motion or by one hardly moving at all. So you can run fast up to the crease, and, just at the moment of bowling, stop dead. This will give the ball a slow flight, even though your arm moves through the air at its ordinary rate. Or you may take your usual number of strides, but each a little longer than usual. This gives extra speed to the run, and consequently to the ball, but the batsman can hardly perceive the reason why. His eyes are fixed on the bowler’s arm. Lastly, there is the trick of giving the ball a forward spin with the tips of the fingers as it leaves the hand, which causes a fast bound from the pitch. Combined with a fast run, this spin makes a ball come along at a surprising pace, without the arm doing anything out of the common. Certain it is that very few lob-bowlers study the run up to the wicket sufficiently. It ought not to be mechanically uniform.”
Slow bowling, as Mr. A. G. Steel points out, may have numerous advantages. It may curve in the air. The batsman has to hit with more force, with more risk of hitting up, more chance of being stumped if he runs out, more chance of being caught at the wicket; the slow bowler has greater control over the pitch of the ball and its spin; he can recover his balance so quickly and so thoroughly that himself he becomes an extra man in the field, having plenty of time to stop a drive and to get behind and put down the wicket when the ball is thrown on; he can last longer.
But he must pitch the ball further up, nearer to the batsman’s reach; he may be hit hard and placed anywhere unless he can make his ball hang in the air or otherwise deceive the batsman, as when the bowler sends it from the palm of the hand, not from the fingers.
Slow medium bowling is safer; and as a general rule medium bowling should be practised before very slow or very fast be attempted. Perhaps for most ordinary bowlers it should form the staple pace, so easily can it be made a little faster or a little slower. It has this advantage over very slow bowling: that it need not be pitched so far up. It has this advantage over very fast bowling, that it can use the break both ways, and can be kept up without much fatigue. He who bowls well within his pace runs little risk of straining himself, although every now and then (like the slow bowler) he can put in an occasional fast ball for a change. No one should ever bowl so fast as to endanger the swing and the knack, as so many boys do; or so fast that he dare not return to the slower for the silly fear of being hit.
Nevertheless—as I once heard a coach remark—if you’re a fool perhaps you’d better bowl fast.
Pace may be varied, somewhat as length may be varied (see above); for example, by a longer or shorter, quicker or slower run; by a run arrested; by a quicker or slower or arrested movement of some part of the mechanism—shoulder, wrist, etc. Spofforth used to hold the ball loosely for slow bowling, tightly for fast, as if he were a train which gives an impetus to the jumping-off passenger by holding on to him till the last moment. Spofforth’s pace as a rule was medium rather than very fast.
BREAK, SPIN, CURL, ETC.
Anyone who has practised bowling in this order—mastering direction, then length, then pace, will now wish to add some sort of break, as the baseball pitcher wishes to add some sort of curl. But here again, as with pace, it is a great error to acquire in excess, so as to “endanger the knack.” I remember a boy who got into his school XI. at the end of the term simply because he could put on a huge break. He had no other merits; in his only match he failed miserably. As a high authority says:—
“The best ball is not the one that breaks most but the one that just breaks enough—enough to beat the bat but not the wicket, or else enough to beat the centre of the bat and just touch its edge.”
The general mechanism of the break has been best described by Mr. A. G. Steel in his now classical chapter of the “Badminton Volume”:—