Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

Chapter Two Bowling revolution In order to understand and appreciate the batting achievements of Fuller Pilch we must first have a clear idea of the bowling methods that he faced. These were very different to those employed in the modern game. Bowling methods evolved and changed very quickly during the first 15 years of his career, including variations of under-arm and round-arm bowling, and he had to adapt and adjust his own batting style to deal with them as the seasons progressed. When cricket was first being played in the fields and on the village greens of England, bowlers propelled the ball towards wickets by rolling it under-arm as fast as possible along the ground. The batsman, using a stick that was curved at the bottom end similar to a modern hockey stick, would attempt to strike the ball past a defending ring of fieldsmen. Due to the nature of the uneven ground between the wickets, the ball would occasionally bounce up over the batsman’s stick and knock his stumps over. Bowlers eventually realised that they could achieve this effect deliberately by slowing down their delivery and tossing the ball forward in a manner which became known as ‘lobbing’. Batsmen, frustrated by the ease in which the bouncing ball could elude the frame of their curved sticks, had them made straighter and wider. Bowlers responded by moving their arm away from their bodies to give room for the hand to twist and spin the ball to make it change direction after landing in front of the batsman. The hand was still well below the elbow and there could be no argument that the method was anything other than under-arm. Regulations concerning the size of a bat were introduced in 1771, according to Peter Wynne-Thomas in his book A History of Cricket: From the Weald to the World , ‘as a result of switching the bowling from along the ground to first bounce to the batsman sometime in the 1760s.’ Keith Warsop has recently presented in The Cricket Statistician evidence that ‘pitching the ball rather than rolling it along the ground can be dated back possibly to before the 1720s.’ In the early 1780s David Harris developed the art of persistent length bowling. A list of batting averages from 1771 to 1864, compiled by Keith Warsop for his article ‘Batting evolution – its effect on run-scoring’ in The Cricket Quarterly in 1966 tells us a great deal about the initial success of Harris and other late eighteenth-century bowlers at curtailing batsmen’s freedom to score. Warsop clarified the compilation of his tables by explaining that he wanted to show how the players compared against others of their generation. He had, therefore, included figures from all 11