The passing of Sonny Ramadhin has focused attention on cricket’s mystery spinner. Some batsmen think that since all spinners are a mystery, that adjective is superfluous. Ramadhin could turn the ball either way without any discernible change in action, often fooling wicket keeper Clyde Walcott who was nearly a foot taller.
In the 1950s, England ran into two mystery spinners in successive series and lost both of them. Ramadhin claimed 26 wickets as the West Indies won in England for the first time, 3-1. The bemused batsmen then ran into Jack Iverson in Australia and lost that series 4-1, Iverson claiming 21 wickets.
Iverson, in the words of his biographer Gideon Haigh, “wasn’t a wrist spinner, for the wrist provided no leverage. He wasn’t a finger spinner, for the middle finger imparted the propulsion, not the rotation. He might have been called a thumb spinner, because it was his undersung thumb that was actually the fulcrum of the delivery…” Iverson had perfected his craft using a ping pong ball held between the thumb and the middle finger.
The inventor of the googly, Bosanquet had experimented with ‘ twisti twosti’, a pastime where you tried to spin a tennis ball past your opponent seated at the other end of a table. His action sent the ball spinning the wrong way.
…till the secret is discovered
Every bowler is a mystery till batsmen discover his secret. Even the man credited with discovering the off break — an 18th century farmer named Lamborn in the days of under-arm bowling where it was natural to turn from leg to off — must have been a mystery bowler initially.
Ramadhin’s career (he claimed 158 wickets in 43 Tests) hastened to its end after Colin Cowdrey and Peter May added 411 to save a Test, sticking their pads out at everything he bowled, and he bowled plenty, 98 overs.
The leg before law was changed thereafter to include dismissals off deliveries outside the off stump to which no stroke was offered. But Ramadhin was through, and although he played on for another three years the mystery had been unravelled, or at least a counter had been worked out.
The unravelling of Iverson was hastened by his own countrymen in a Shield match when Arthur Morris and Keith Miller worked out that the high tossed ball tended to be the top spinner while the one at a lower trajectory was the wrong ‘un. Morris made 182, Miller 83 in quick time and demonstrated how to play Iverson. Ignore his hand, work him out in the air.
Closest to Iverson
The bowler who came closest to being an Iverson clone was Australia’s John Gleeson who used the same thumb-and-middle-finger technique but spun less. He was said to be bowling ‘iversons’. The term never caught on, like ‘bosie’ (from Bosanquet) did for the googly or ‘saqi’ (from Saqlain Mushtaq) might still for the doosra.
Gleeson’s fingers were made strong by milking cows in his hometown in New South Wales. David Frith brings him alive in this description: “…this laconic postal technician with ears like cabbage leaves, his green cap perched on his head like a pancake…”
When Saqlain Mushtaq introduced the doosra, it upset coaches because it could not be bowled without altering the angle of the arm. Muttiah Muralitharan’s doosra cause a rule change, with the acceptable angle of the bend relaxed, but the delivery was still discouraged. Graeme Swann picked up 255 Test wickets without having to resort to the doosra.
Bosanquet had said of his googly, “It’s not unfair, only immoral.” The doosra is seen as both unfair and immoral.
Short-term sensation
The mystery bowler often tends to be a one-trick pony, and consequently a one-season wonder since once his one code is decrypted, he lacks the range or the confidence to carry on.
South Africa’s Paul Adams whose action was compared to that of a “frog in a blender” was quickly sorted out as was Sri Lanka’s Ajantha Mendis who began well but lacked the consistency to fall back upon when he was rumbled.
Also, like poets are reputed to be, spinners come across as delicate creatures who sometimes can’t handle punishment, rather in the manner of poets who can’t face criticism.
The success of bowlers like Saqlain, Muralitharan and Bhagwat Chandrasekhar lay in the fact that these bowlers had more to offer, and were orthodox more often than not.
It will become increasingly difficult for the emerging mystery spinner, though. Sunil Naraine, for example, has had to counter something neither Iverson nor Ramadhin did: slow motion television and extreme analysis. There can be no secrets or mysteries in cricket — or if there are, the cameras quickly help to negate them.
But, as Haigh writes in the Iverson biography, Mystery Spinner, “It is perfectly possible that cricket has still to fathom the full potentialities of the rotated ball.” And that is a comforting thought.