…if it ain’t got that swing! Try a little experiment next time you have a spare wall and a partially deflated light children’s plastic football to hand – or rather to foot. Stand ten metres away from the wall and kick the ball with the outside of your foot with the intention of hitting the wall on the full. You may find that the ball swings two ways, first to the right (the equivalent of the cricketing ‘inswing’ and then to the left - the ‘outswinger’). The heavier or more inflated the ball, the more difficult it is to reproduce the result – it’s very hard indeed to achieve with a real football. So why does it behave like that? Over to the physicists, I’m afraid. I’m merely reporting the phenomenon, not explaining it.
The ‘swing’ of a cricket ball is still mystifying too, although there are many scientists and sports gurus who claim to understand it. Most bowlers however, even at the highest levels of skill, know there are days on which however much they polish one side of the ball or unbalance it with rubbed in sweat or dirt, however much they concentrate on a correct, upright or slightly canted seam position, the ball will obstinately maintain an arrow straight passage through the air. Other days, as is the current expression, they’ll bowl hoops without apparently having to try. The individual ball clearly has an influence, as do the atmospheric conditions, but the results are always unpredictable. ‘Reverse’ swing is now in our vocabulary too - easier to show than explain in print. Get a handy bowler to show you the principle. This phenomenon too is elusive.
The two-way swing thing does happen in cricket, although usually as a before and after bouncing thing. Wicketkeepers are sometimes left grasping at air as a rogue delivery sells them a dummy. And sometimes bowlers of extremely moderate pace are said to ‘wobble’ the ball – probably a combination of the direction of the breeze and their own natural tendency to swing the ball one way or another. At the age of fifteen I was one such, although an extremely open chest at the point of delivery plus a bowling arm which tended to drop into my stomach meant that the ball mostly just swung in to the batsman, often by quite a prodigious amount. Usually I got batsmen out clean bowled as the ball disappeared under their nose and cannoned into the leg-stump. It was a trick quickly worked out however, and anyway as I grew taller the amount of swing I could generate reduced substantially. Sadly I never learned to properly bowl an outswinger by changing my body position and adjusting the follow-through of my arm. I wish someone had been on hand to properly advise me apart from the one itinerant coach who briefly muttered about ‘bracing my leg’. I get the point now, but didn’t then.
At Leeds, England failed to claw back the fine mess their batters had gotten them into because their bowling lacked discipline, and two of their bowling attack, Harmison and Broad aren’t gifted swingers of the ball. They’re tall men who ‘hit the deck hard’ i.e. their speed and bounce are their main weapons. Anderson is the best England swing bowler, but he seemed to be carrying an injury which reduced both his pace and accuracy, and there was noticeably less attack in his approach to the bowling crease. His swing on this occasion often seemed telegraphed to the batsmen. Onions isn’t yet experienced enough to carry the weight when his colleagues aren’t firing on all cylinders. But there are destructive days to come from him, although maybe not in this series now: like Anderson at his best he can swing the ball late in its flight and at a good pace. The later the ball moves, the more likely the batsman is to feather an edge to the wicketkeeper or slip fielders.
Briefly in the late afternoon we hoped that England might show some fight, and we dreamed of that great Headingley match of 1981 when lagging behind on first innings by a substantial margin, Ian Botham and Graham Dilley launched an assault on the Australian bowlers which carried England to a lead of not very many. Then Bob Willis tore in down the hill like a man possessed (TV pictures of the time show him as a man so focused as not to be really there) and blew the dazed Australian batsmen away so that England won by 18 runs. It was a dizzy, dazzling afternoon of obscure improbabilities. But by the close of day two at Headlingley 2009 five English batsmen had walked purposefully to the middle before trudging back again. There was to be no miracle this time.
Close of day 2: England 102 and 82 for 5 Australia 445
