What was that PlayStation game a few years back where you as the bowler bowled dots and singles to fill up a meter that allowed you one almost unplayable yorker or bouncer? I remember it being fairly popular. Was is EA Cricket ’07, or something like that? Doesn’t matter, really, but the implication was that the yorker and the bouncer were balls that required the momentum and confidence that bowler only gets through a series of in-match successes—almost a special move or a finisher—something you as the bowler built up to and eventually earned. We know now, of course, what we knew then, which is that a bowler, say Bumrah or Malinga, can bowl the yorker (let’s just stick to the yorker for the sake of my question) whenever he decides even though it might be best to pick and choose the opportune moments to fire the toe crushing laser, so the build-up, the filling of the abstract meter, it was a convention of the game and not in the least bit realistic. It made the video game more fun, if not more realistic, and more fun when you’re playing a video game is typically a good thing even when the developer sacrifices some verisimilitude in the process. What remained real, however, and still kind of sticks with me today, is the rhetoric behind the building up of the meter—what the process implies without stating explicitly—that the yorker is superior to other types of ball. It’s harder to hit, at least it’s harder to hit with power, and, as such, it’s implementation often means the best a batsman can do is to jam his bat into the ground and â€dig it out,†which is all well and good in test cricket when a batsman faces essentially an infinite number of balls, but less so in limited overs cricket where that yorker costs the batsman one of a finite supply of opportunities to score.
So the question that I’ve been carrying with me for some time—almost ten years, probably: why not, in limited overs cricket, why not bowl only yorkers each and every time? I know the common answers to the question, for instance, many claim a bowler simply can’t bowl that many yorkers in a row, and each missed yorker is either an equally appetizing full ball or half volley. Bowling only yorkers, then, is simply too risky. But this explanation only works when the yorker is practiced in commensuration with its status as a surprise rather than a stock ball. What if a limited overs bowler mostly practiced yorkers and tossed in a good length ball or shorter as the one to keep the batsman off balance? It doesn’t seem realistic that some bowlers simply can’t bowl them, like, physiologically they can’t. I’m sure when we say someone can’t bowler a yorker, we mean he’s not good at bowling them because he doesn’t stress it in training and, consequently, hasn’t mastered the skill.
The other common answer is that a bowler doesn’t know exactly where the batsman is going to stand in the crease or to where the batsman will move as the bowler delivers the ball—an answer that only makes sense if the bowler can only bowl the yorker in one place. What about moving the yorker length ball in and out? Leg stump, off stump, fourth stump, wider, back to leg, with swing, without swing—you get it. The yorker length doesn’t need to be the feature that keeps the batsman off balance when the bowler can also mix up the location of the ball whilst maintaining that deep, constraining length. A steady stream of varied yorker length deliveries, I would think, should be enough to cramp the batsman and undercut any power.
Obviously, then, the batsman could just move deeper in his crease and play the ball as a half volley, but that’s where the bouncer or the shorter ball of good length comes in to surprise the batsman and ultimately keep him honest. Or then you bowl it a little deeper to counteract the batsman’s movement and you get the same effect. I’m not saying batsman wouldn’t score runs, but the number of boundaries, sixes especially, would dwindle, you would think.
Now I now I’m making this easier than it actually is; I know yorkers are extremely difficult to pull off and that, in many cases, their riskiness outweighs anything but the best case scenario from the bowler’s perspective—I get all this. But most of these judgments are based on specific assumptions generated from a model of bowling that has evolved from test cricket, where the batsman’s front-foot-back-foot decision dominates his concentration. Take all of that out in limited overs cricket, however, particularly in T20—these guys have decided first and foremost to go for boundaries, an objective foreign to the test batsman whose wicket is worth too much for that kind of temerity. The limited overs batsman cares more about runs per ball faced than he does his own wicket—he’s going to slog anything you bowl his way, so undercutting that power should be on the forefront of the bowler’s mind. The yorker does that. And, hey, if you miss and he hits it for six, he would have, or could have, done that to a shorter ball as well, so why not give yourself a shot at cramping the big guy in the crease.
I don’t really know the answer to this, and if it hasn’t been answered before, I suspect it will as limited overs cricket supersedes test cricket in the public’s collective conscious causing coaches to reimagine the game from a limited overs first perspective.
thebeehive.com
