Lives in Cricket No 52 - Schooled in Cricket (2nd edition)

15 descriptions exceedingly slow. This unusually slow bowling has always been something for spectators, at least, to find amusing as well as absorbing. Someone who can bowl it well and effectively is usually a character. And the additional facets of a leg spin bowler – his greater variety of possible deliveries – with the leg spin itself where the ball spins away to the off to a right-handed batsman, as well as the googly plus the top spinner and even the flipper (back spinner) – before we consider subtle changes of flight, pace and other variables – the mere existence of the leg spinner has contributed greatly into making cricket such a colourful game. Flight is the key. The batsman sees the ball coming towards him and has to assess where on the ground – if at all – the ball is going to pitch. Subtleties of loop, pace and trajectory can at times totally flummox this assessment. There is a substantial claim that no-one besides Johnny Lawrence has taken the art of bowling so slowly to such a high professional level. He did so in a surprisingly competitive and consistent manner over a career which, at one professional level or another, exceeded 40 years and ten of those years in first class cricket with Somerset. He was certainly a good batter but he must be regarded as a bowling all-rounder and as we will see he got wickets aplenty against batsmen great and small throughout his career. The stories are endless and ‘legion’. Cricket can be such a cruel game for batsmen at the best of times – but crueller still the slower the bowler who torments the batsman. I’m not sure whether it would have been less cruel to have got out to such a kindly man as Johnny! Jack Bethel throws some light on this as we shall see in a later chapter. It is not clear if Johnny’s bowling was always as slow as living witnesses now remember even though he didn’t play first-class cricket until he was 35 – so he had bowled for a generation before that. He wanted to develop a seriously quicker ball as a variety against certain batsmen. There is no evidence that he ever achieved this. He could bowl An exceedingly slow bowler