Lives in Cricket No 39 - Alec Watson

73 Chucker? to make people think I threw’; an admission that he was aware of the problem, though the words ‘used to’ might suggest that the problem was now in the past. Yet as long as ‘the umpires never grumbled’, as a thick-skinned Scotsman he could bear it; perhaps an echo of the old, and unanswerable, Scottish comment on one’s critics: ‘They haif sayd quhat they say. Quhat say they, lat thame say.’ To return to Watson’s bowling action: while the grip and action of the fingers would impart some break, there would probably have to be some rotational action by the wrist and possibly the elbow as well. While there may not have been any bend in the wrist or elbow, any movement at these joints would have looked suspicious. Is that perhaps another cause of the suspicions about Watson’s action? An important source for such matters is found in David Buchanan’s own 1894 essay, Hints on Slow Round Bowling . He noted that there were two types of spin: break, ‘which gives the ball a tendency, the moment it comes in contact with the ground, to rise straighter, and not only that, but to go in the opposite direction to that in which it would naturally go’, in other words it would ‘break back’ from off to leg; and bias, ‘which gives the ball a tendency to come quicker off the ground, though with an inclination to shoot along it, and in a direction to move laterally from the leg to the off’. Buchanan describes the break-back motion: The bowler is running up to the crease, holding the ball as before described, with a moderate or light pressure, so as to be able to give more nerve power in the act of delivery; at that moment the pressure must be tightened, and the ball freed with a jerk or twist [my italics] of the hand or wrist, the thumb and fingers doing their part. Directly the ball, full of life and mischief, is on its way to the wicket, the back of the hand will appear facing the ground, the little finger and the side of the hand being towards the batsman and the palm of the hand, of course, upwards.’ In bias, the leg-spinner or top-spinner, the action was generally in the opposite direction, Buchanan noting that ‘the whole arm assists in giving bias’. It is clear from the above that the break-back involved using the wrist and that a jerk would be used in this; with possibly the whole arm being involved in some way. Prima facie, that would seem to imply a contravention of the simple terms of Law X; so