Empire Cricket Booklet

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RICHARD PARRY AND DALE SLATER

who saw the possibilities, and with Warner nursed Bosanquet through its development in county cricket and its ultimately successful unleashing against the Australians in the 1903/04 Test series. Bosanquet took the googly as far he could. It was further improved in South African hands, and by 1905/06 South Africa fielded a team containing four googly bowlers, all of whom met with remarkable success. Bosanquet, of Eton and Oxford University, was the archetypical amateur, and had honed the googly in amateur and country-house games where it was half curiosity and half practical joke. The googly was inevitably a product of an upper class with sufficient leisure time not only to play amateur cricket (though as the careers of many 'amateurs' were to show, this did not always mean unpaid), but to be less economically dependent than professionals on their ongoing success in the game. Consequently, it was unlikely to have been developed by a professional who could not afford to invest time and effort on a gamble that a new delivery could work successfully enough to ensure his continued livelihood. Bowling the googly with sufficient control for it to be become effective was likely to take considerable time and practice. It was perhaps this indulgent aspect that Cardus had uppermost in mind when he referred to Bosanquet's 'exquisite decadence'. 3 Bosanquet's description of the process was self deprecating in the approved upper-class way. He persevered partly, as he put it, because 'the lot of the average fast-medium bowler was not a happy one. It generally meant being put on under a sweltering sun, on a plumb wicket, when the other bowlers had failed and the two batsmen were well set'. 4 What he did not mention, was that in general the 'average fast-medium bowler' was a professional. Professionals were needed to bowl at amateurs in the nets and inevitably bore the brunt of the bowling in matches. Bosanquet discovered that the results were worth the perseverance 'for in addition to adding to the merriment of the cricketing world, I found that batsmen who used to grin at the sight of me and grasp their bat firmly by the long handle, began to show a marked preference for the other end'. 5 The cleverness of the googly lay in the deception itself. To be successful, Bosanquet had to convince batsmen

is an off-break bowled with a leg-break action by a right-handed bowler. The method of delivery consists in turning over the wrist at the moment of delivery further than the leg-break and therefore altering the axis of spin. A ball which, when normally delivered with this action breaks from the leg, would, when the bowler uses the googly action, break from the off. The crucial point is that it is almost impossible to read the difference in action when skilfully disguised. As such, the googly does not simply confound expectations as, for example, a straight ball from an out-swing bowler might do, but causes consternation by actually doing the opposite. What is more, it generally turns and bounces considerably more than a conventional off-break, and on occasions even more than the leg-break it so resembles out of the hand, as the tendons in the wrist are further extended and more rotations are applied to the ball. The googly, as the embodiment of doubt, turned the comfortable assumptions made by batsmen as to the behaviour of the ball from strengths into weaknesses. The mere possibility of the googly being bowled turned even the most innocuous leg-break into a potential destroyer. The googly can be a tricky ball to play even if a batsman knows what is coming, but the true devilishness is in the deceit. The googly represents a pretence at orthodoxy, a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is, when bowled by an expert, virtually impossible for a normally observant batsman to tell precisely from the bowler's action whether the ball will spin from leg to off as a normal leg-break or break prodigiously in the other direction. C. B. Fry noted, for example, that only Jack Hobbs ever claimed to have been able to 'pick' Aubrey Faulkner's googly. He did so by seeing which way the ball was spinning as it moved towards him through the air, but as Fry put it, 'Jack Hobbs on his day is a humorist'. 2 The googly was not a South African invention. Although there were numerous instances of bowlers who bowled accidental googlies in the 1890s and before when attempting to deliver leg-breaks, Bernard Bosanquet, the Middlesex and England all rounder, was the first to recognise what it was and to develop and master it. Initially, Bosanquet saw it essentially as an extended joke, but it was C. B. Fry