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

234 The left arm ‘chinaman’ bowler also has a googly in his repertoire but this time the ball spins like a right-handed leg spinner. Yorkshire have had leg spinner bowlers at times in their history and none finer than their present day player Bradford-born Adil Rashid – perhaps a belated product of covered wickets which initially made the life of spin-bowlers much more difficult. Also the great Johnny Wardle – effectively Verity’s eventual successor when cricket resumed after the war. As approximately only one bowler in ten is left-handed and a small minority of spin bowlers are wrist spin (especially before Shane Warne re-invented the success of leg spin bowling) – the statistical chances of a spin bowler bowling this type may be as low as one in a hundred. Because the stock ball of the chinaman bowler is coming in to the right-handed batsman from the off, it has no special penetrative qualities so this is yet more reason why this type of bowling is difficult to make an impact at the top level. Chuck Fleetwood Smith, an Australian playing in the 1930s, was probably the most successful ever exponent of this type of bowling. The biographer’s own academic interest in very slow bowling referred to in chapter was enhanced by playing with and against a bowler called Steve Scott – a left-arm orthodox spin bowler who used to play Bradford League cricket and thence for the Yorkshire friendly side Jesters. He has described himself – both to me and on the Jesters’ website – as the slowest bowler in the world – and I know of no-one (in those small circles in which I happen to have mixed) who refutes his claim. I know my own bowling to be exceedingly slow – even when I’m bowling my ‘demonic’ quicker ball – but I realise that I cannot compete for slowness with Steve Scott who specialised in bowling a ball that goes up in the air ever so high and then drops down usually on a perfect length before proceeding on its spun or unspun trajectory. What is significant – as I have stated – about Johnny Lawrence’s very slow variety of leg spin, is the professional level and sheer quality with which he bowled it throughout his career – not just in the Somerset years. Appendix Three: Giving a dubious guide to spin bowling