Sport Today

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If Thomson and Holding were reduced to looking "only marginally nippy",
then I must say that with the rather ordinary protective equipment that
was available to batsmen in those days, I'm surprised that you see so few
reports of batsmen who were injured in the games played then...

These days, in almost any series, especially those involving the West
Indies, such injuries are commonplace, the only series in recent times
which did'nt see any(?) such injuries was the one vs Pakistan in 1993.
Since the days when the WI have had a reasonably large number of
"reasonably nippy" bowlers in their team (Roberts, Holding, Croft,
Marshall, Daniel, Ambrose, Bishop etc), one just has to read reports of
the matches they have played in to see how often the batsmen were injured,
especially if you don't count *just* injuries to the head (which get more
extensive coverage in the press) and include injuries to the wrist, the
arm and the body.

So, how does one explain the sudden rise in the number of injuries ?
Either the speedsters of the days gone by were an especially friendly
lot, and never pitched the ball even short enough to make it rise chest
high, or the batsmen of the days gone by were incredibly good...

OR one has to reach the conclusion that as recording equipment and speed
measuring equipment became available, and became more sophisticated, by
some *curious* coincidence, the speed of fast bowlers came down, and the
skill of the batsmen deteriorated *so much* that even with improvements in
the quality of protective equipment, the poor saps were going out and
getting their wrists/arms/bodies/heads in the way and getting injured more
frequently than their predecessors.

And we suddenly need laws limiting bouncers too! How interesting !

Win or lose, forever Windies.
Venky (Venkatesh Sridharan).

PS: What do the "old*er* fogeys" say about the bowlers before Larwood and
    Co.? Were they even quicker ?

One possible reason could be that in the gone days of yore, teams had
one or at the most two fast bowlers. With the WI employing four fast
bowlers of almost equal speed, the chances of getting hit increase.
There is a world of difference in playing one or four
fast (or difficult) bowlers.

Another factor would be the chances of a batsman losing concentration.
With four fast bowlers sooner or later you are going to lose your
concentration and either get hit or get out. With one fast bowler, you
concentrate like mad for a five/six over spell and then await the next
spell.

Shamim

 My oath they were. Have you ever heard of Kortright? The absolute fastest
 ever

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* Geoff Bethell                        SOUTH AFRICA to win NEED         *
*                                         22 runs off 1 ball            *
*                                                                       *
*                                   ELECTRONIC SCOREBOARD, SCG. WC92    *
*************************************************************************

PS

It is certainly the case that there was less intimidatory bowling in
the days of Larwood & Co. In fact open show of hostilities was frowned
upon. There was less short pitched bowling, period.

Shamim

says:

  Somehow, the Australians playing the English in 1932-33 might
not agree with that statement.  ;-)

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        The interesting thing isn't so much the quality of the equipment
as the way it has become higher -- used to be nothing, then pads, then
boxes [OK, out of order!], then gloves, then thigh pads, then chest pads,
then helmets.  Must say something about the nature of the game!

        You *do* see plenty of reports of injuries in the old days;
"poor Fred", Mynn, Summers and others received notoriously serious
injuries pre-1900, and there was the famous "Punch" cartoon of the
man swathed in bandages being asked "Accident?"  "No, I 'ad a hover
of Jackson." [John Jackson, the much-feared Notts fast bowler of the
period].  Bearing in mind how (relatively) few matches there were,
cricket was pretty dangerous, at least until pitches improved towards
the end of the 19th century.

        Well, they weren't exactly friendly.  But you will recall that
the "Bodyline" tour caused serious international ructions when the
*worst* that Larwood did was to make the ball rise chest high, and that
Cowdrey was thought seriously wimpish for wearing a chest-protector.
The *norm* for a fast bowler in the 1950s was a couple of overs of
flat-out pace, three or so further overs of slower stuff as the bowler
ran out of steam [today's bowlers are typically *much* fitter], then
rest and let the slow bowlers do the work.  In the first two overs,
a couple of [chest-high] bouncers to intimidate the batsman was about
as much as was worth using -- any more was just wasting the prime
wicket-taking opportunity;  after that, bowling slow bouncers was just a
waste of time.  In a day of six hours, 120 overs, there might reasonably
be at most 40 overs by fast bowlers [discounting the medium pacers], of
which 16 might be at full pace, so 16 fast, short-pitched deliveries would
be the norm.  Today, the WIndies quartets, rotated to keep them fresh, might
deliver that many bouncers, let alone the merely short-pitched, every hour.

        I don't think this is implied.  There are *very* few Test-class
out-and-out fast bowlers.  Merely slinging the ball down as fast as
humanly possible doesn't make a good bowler -- you have also to have
control over length and line, and you will be much more dangerous still
if you can add an element of swing.  I simply don't know whether (say)
Ambrose and Bishop are faster or slower than (say) Lindwall and Miller
or (say) Voce and Allen.  What is clear is that Larwood, Tyson, Thomson
and Holding were significantly faster than the *normal* fast bowler.
Tyson is the fastest I have personally witnessed (by some margin);  but
perhaps Thomson and Holding had declined somewhat by the time I saw them
in action at Trent Bridge.  None of those four was, as far as I know,
ever measured scientifically in normal action at their peaks;  demos in
nets simply aren't the same.  It *should* be possible to get *some* info
from newsreel or television footage, but the accuracy would be quite
limited, and for Tyson and Larwood I suspect there are only a rather
small number of recorded deliveries still available, and fewer still
of them bowling flat out.  [All the footage I have seen of Larwood --
still pretty impressive! -- is from the "Bodyline" tour, when he was
29, and presumably over the hill.  I'd like to see some from 1926-8.]

        The "poor saps" are, as detailed above, facing *many* more
dangerous deliveries per year;  and are probably dealing with them
in a more dangerous way.  Before helmets, only [a minority of] the
really top-class batsman would stand in front of a bouncer;  today,
many lesser bats take the risk, and occasionally get hit on the elbow
or the wrist (or the helmet).

        We need laws dealing with dangerous bowling.  Full stop.  We
have already seen in rugger and soccer the first moves towards suing
players who deliberately injure their opponents.  A bowler who
deliberately bowls a fast ball at the batsman's head is, in my view,
criminally responsible if the batsman is injured;  and the Laws, the
umpires and the captains must do all they can to make such bowling
unprofitable.  I fully agree with your implication than the bouncer
law is unsatisfactory as it stands;  but so was the previous (and
still existing, of course) law.  I suppose someone must propose a
suitable replacement.  How about:

        "If the ball passes above chest height, then the ball shall
        be called wide and shall not count in the over.  There shall
        be no penalty for such a wide unless, in the umpire's opinion,
        the ball was wilfully aimed at the batsman's person, in which
        case two penalty runs shall be added to the score (in addition
        to any runs scored by the batsman)."

There you are, you can bowl short at the batsman's midriff or chest as
much as you like [subject to the previous "persistent short-pitched
bowling" unfair-play Law], but anything higher is a waste of effort,
and aiming at the head is penalised.

        The Trent Bridge older fogeys are, of course, biassed;  but
Kortright has already been mentioned, and Jones might be another.
I think there was *general* agreement in the 1930s, judging from
articles of the time, that Larwood was as fast as anyone, and most
certainly the fastest of the "great" bowlers, up to that time.  I
haven't heard any dispute that Larwood was the fastest genuinely
Test-class bowler before Tyson.

--
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.

 >

Seems like some people have not heard about "bodyline".  Human nature has
not changed that much over the years. I believe that there is a human
tendency to inflate the perceptions that gave the most pleasure. For me,
because my best memories of cricket was of the mid 1960's WIndies,
Richardson, Lara and Hooper will never be quite as good as Kanhai, Butcher
and Nurse. That is not because they were in fact better, but because they
come from the "good old days". That is the case with fast bowlers as well.
I have heard old fogies swear that Constantine, Martindale and George John
were "yards faster" than Hall, Roberts and Holding. Were they really? I
think not. I remember hearing Constantine commentating on cricket in the
WI and always referring to what used to be the case "in my day" and it was
always better than Lloyd, Boyce, Kallicharan and others could ever do,
notwithstanding the fact that the WI hardly won any tests back then.  Human
memory is fragile indeed.

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 Educ. & Psych,         Phone: (509)527-2771
 Walla Walla College    Christ is ALL!

[... discussion on the perception of retired players deleted
 to satisfy fascist posting software ...]

[... deleted, again ...]

Well said, Austin. When objective measures are available, it almost
always turns out that modern standards are higher (in all aspects of
our existence). So, when the old timers almost invariably favour
things gone by on subjective issues, we should be wary.

Modern athletes run much faster, throw all kinds of missiles much
further, swim much better, jump much higher and further, ... We know
all of these things because they are measured carefully. Why would the
aspects that we do not measure in the same way consistently be
inferior to [some] earlier performances, when they are subject to the
same forces for improvement, and benefit from the same technological
and other advances?

Count me with the modernists.

Etienne

Yeah, all those really neat techno things like steroids ...

Shaun.
--
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Department of Physics           "Reality is that which, when you stop
University of Alberta           believing in it, doesn't go away."
Edmonton, Alberta

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        This is true.  On the other hand, it is precisely when objective
measures are available that standards can be driven by them -- we can
improve training, equipment, selection and so on by measuring performance.
When only subjective evidence is available, there are many fields in which
modern standards are not clearly higher.  Take, for example, music;  who
would claim (other than as a debating ploy) that today's composers are
greater than Bach or Mozart or Beethoven?  I don't have to *remember*
how good Bach was, we can get modern performances, and compare directly
the standards of composition.  Even with musical performances, there might
be general agreement that today's pianists or violinists are *technically*
better than those of yesteryear [again, directly comparable on recordings],
meaning measurably faster and more accurate, but there are many experts
who claim that the old timers display at least as much musicality as the
moderns.  Much the same applies in painting and literature.  Outside art,
are today's generals and admirals any better than Caesar, Alexander or
Nelson?  Today's teachers any better than Socrates or Plato?  Today's
mathematicians any better than Newton or Gauss?  How would we tell?

        *Somewhat* faster.  Say, 10% over 30-ish years?  But some of
that is due to better equipment [shoes, tracks], some to improved
training [professional coaches], better stamina [diets and training],
new techniques [Fosbury flop], and so on.

        Almost none of this applies to cricketers.  There are still
many top-class players who smoke, drink and eat to excess, and whose
idea of training is an occasional round of golf.  The two areas of
cricket that have improved visibly are the fielding and the stamina
of fast bowlers.  I see no reason at all to suppose that today's
batsmen are any better than yesterday's, or today's slow or medium
bowlers.  Fast bowling is, of course, relevant to this debate;  but
the fact that Waqar or Wasim, Hughes or Ambrose, or whoever, might
today bowl a hostile spell of 10+ overs does not make them *faster*
than Trueman or Tyson bowling 2 overs flat out, 3 overs of fast medium,
then off to rest.

        If there were an Olympic event, "Bowling the cricket ball as
fast as possible", then we would no doubt see properly trained athletes
developing their techniques, and records would tumble.  But there isn't;
and indeed, the evolutionary pressures on cricketers are somewhat the
other way.  The tearaway fast bowler usually becomes Test class only
when he adds accuracy and variation to his technique, which means
slowing down a little, at least for the stock balls.  Tyson and perhaps
Thomson were exceptions;  they were (apparently) Test class only because
of their extreme speed.  Larwood and Holding were exceptions;  they
were able to bowl accurately at top speed.  But the typical great fast
bowler, the Trueman, the Hadlee, the Waqar, the Ambrose, the Lillee,
becomes slightly less great when striving for extra pace.  He uses
the occasional faster ball to unsettle the batsman, and sometimes to
surprise him for pace, but his main weapon is controlled swing or
bounce or seam, or a disguised slower ball, or whatever.

--
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.

Neither has, it seems, the propensity of people to be presumptuous.
Why assume that I would not have heard/read about the "bodyline"
controversy?

The fact that "bodyline" to this day figures prominently in such
discussions should convince you that short pitched intimidatory
bowling was not that common in those days. How many times have you
heard of a bodyline like row since the WIan four-pronged attack
started operations in 1975 or thereabouts?  Most of the complaints are
about how boring it is to watch a four pace attack. What we do not get
is captains resigning because of the bouncers being bowled by their
fast bowlers. Add to this the fact that nobody bowled bouncers at
tailenders.  As David Wheeler points out in a related message, teams
used to have at most one really fast bowler who would put in a five
over stint with perhaps two overs of really fast bowling.

There is some truth to your assertion that people tend to have
selective memories. Some old timers claim that Mohammad Nisar was
faster than Larwood which I dispute. But I do not believe that fast
short pitched bowling was this common prior to 1975.

Shamim

Unlikely.  That means that, under the current laws, the West Indian ***s
would have to bowl 16 overs in an hour ;-)

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David A. Wheeler, Motorola Ltd., Basingstoke, Hampshire, England

Not presumption, just a small sprinkling of sarcasm. No harm intended. Still
not convinced, though.

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 Educ. & Psych,         Phone: (509)527-2771
 Walla Walla College    Christ is ALL!