Impact of Spin Bowling on Cricket

The gentleman’s game, invented by the Royal British, Cricket was a far mature and finer version of baseball. Shots were not random, bowling was not pitching and everything had a style,class and method to it. Cricket was initially mostly restricted to good seam pace bowling or at least a medium pace. Pitches were mostly flat, less grass on it, and the faster you bowled, you had higher chances of taking a wicket.

Fast bowlers were revered and were given special status in cricket, even more than the batsmen. There was a sense of fear, respect for them and of course lot of batsmen dreaded them
 Some of the all time greats in fast bowling included Curtly Ambrose, Allan Donald, Shane Bond, Shoaib Akhtar, Malcolm Marshall, Courtney Walsh. It wasnt surprising to see the biggest names of fast bowling was largely from West Indies

Even as a youngster playing cricket as a career you either became a batsman or a pace bowler. Not anything else

While cricket had its evolution, spin bowling came into existence quite late and its impact much later. This was a major game changer as people found this new format of bowling to be humourous at first and later understood its importance as a match winner. Spin bowling required a lot of finesse and more technique than pace bowling which mostly relied on line and length. Spin Bowling involved knowing where to pitch, degrees of variation of spin and the pace. Sometimes it could even be a googly. A ball that you expected to turn left suddenly turned sharp right and cleaned the stumps away
Spin Bowling needed far less stamina than pace bowling who had to run at least 20 yards before every delivery.  Requiring just a few steps to bowl, a spin bowler could decide up to the last minute on what kind of delivery he wanted to bowl

This spin bowling popularized by E.Prasanna,Shane Warne and Saqlain Mushtaq had an huge impact especially in one day internationals. During the slog overs, when fast bowlers were quite tired ,spin bowling quickly gave a turnaround in terms of wickets and also didn’t give many runs away. This made batsmen more alert and had to read each delivery before hitting it.
Shane Warne in particular bowled the ball of the century to Mike Gatting where a ball pitched outside leg stump turned and rooted the off stump . This one delivery defined the era of spin bowling and several budding youngsters suddenly took to spin bowling

Anil Kumble had a much variation when it comes to spin bowling and was the lone leg spinner for the Indian cricket team for quite a long time until R.Ashwin took his place. Though IPL had a terrible impact on spin , mainly because it conceded runs, however the other versions still largely depend on quality spin

This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can  apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.