The ATG Teams General arguing/discussing thread

[the big bambino]

All-time XI of champs who played less than 30 tests

Barry Richards
Bill Ponsford
G. Headley
G.A. Pollock
Eddie Paynter
Mike Procter
Gerry Alexander +*
Peter Pollock
Colin Croft
Tiger O'Reilley
Syd Barnes

12th man: Ryan Harris

Croft out Harris in. Pollock out Larwood in

Excellent. Might be good for balance to have Faulkner instead of one of O'Reilly/Barnes.

Erh ... no.

 

[Bolo]

Why no Faulkner? He's by far the best suited player in history for balancing a side.

 

[bagapath]

Tiger is a leg spinner, possibly the best ever. Can't have two leggies. So, no Faulkner

 

[harsh.ag]

Tiger is a leg spinner, possibly the best ever. Can't have two leggies. So, no Faulkner

Barnes and O'Reilly are pretty similar from all accounts, no?

And Faulkner would be great for bolstering lower order batting. Him at 6. Procter at 8. Suddenly you have a long tail.

 

[watson]

LESS THAN 30 TESTS

01. Barry Richards
02. Vijay Merchant
03. George Headley
04. Graham Pollock
05. Vijay Hazare
06. Aubrey Faulkner
07. Mike Procter
08. Jock Cameron
09. Harold Larwood
10. Sydney Barnes
11. Bill O’Reilly


01. Bill Ponsford
02. Eddie Barlow
03. Kumar Ranjitsinhji
04. Seymour Nurse
05. Colin Bland
06. WG Grace
07. Denis Lindsay
08. Jack Gregory
09. Johnny Wardle
10. Fred Spofforth
11. Neil Adcock

 

[Bolo]

All three of them are basically leggies, with some difference in speed and variation. Best balance would definitely be to drop O'Reilly and include Faulkner. Whether it would make for a better team is another matter- i think your tail is too long but extra batting vs extra bowling is just a matter of preference. My question was more directed at bambino's dismissal of the suggestion that it would be better for balance than your decision not to include him.

Faulkner is only player in history who could potentially balance out an ATG side IMO. I'd want 3 ATG quicks and 2 ATG spinners in a side, but this leaves the batting too weak. I'd rather play one very good spinner than one very good quick who can bat in this lineup, and Faulkner is the only option

 

[bagapath]

Barnes was a new ball bowler. Probably operated at Bedser's pace. At worst he probably bowled at Tony Greig's pace. He did say that he used his fingers to "cut" the ball. But he was certainly not a spinner, from what I have understood.

 

[Bolo]

He definitely described what he did as spin. I recall some anecdote about him getting indignant about somebody suggesting that he didn't spin it. He may have cut the ball as well (not sure), but his main weapon was a spinner of sorts that moved away from the right hander. As far as I know, it was a combination of wrist and finger spin, but it sounds like it would have played like conventional wrist spin if it was slower.

He opened the bowling because he was quicker. He didn't bowl with flight and a hard ball gave him more bounce. I think he also bowled more conventional mediums with a new ball though- I'm not too sure what was cut/spin or swing/drift.

 

[AndrewB]

You may be thinking of this interview with David Frith:

'Did he cut the ball like Underwood? "Cut it!" He glared, and again I wondered if he might hurl something at me. "I spun the ball!" Those long, gnarled fingers gyrated around imaginary leather. He bowled a brisk medium, but applied spin, with excruciating accuracy.'

There's a similar comment in the article in Wisden 2012 by Peter Gibbs about when he, as a young Staffordshire batsman, was assigned the job of looking after the 90-year-old Barnes during a match against Bedfordshire: ' "Even so, an ideal pitch for cutters?" I persisted. "Possibly. I was a spinner, not a cutter." His expression clouded at my apparent confusion."

 

[Bolo]

Ya, good catch, that Firth interview definitely rings a bell.

 

[bagapath]

Ah right. I misremembered it i guess

 

[watson]

.

2013
Turn back the clock

By AMOL RAJAN

Revisiting the forgotten art of medium-pace spin, purveyed a century ago to extraordinary effect by Sydney Barnes


.......The dashing county player Jack Meyer said Barnes was definitely quicker than Alec Bedser, which seems astonishing. My guess is that, depending on the pitch, Barnes would hit around 70 or even 75mph. If you're a club cricketer, that's probably up there with the fastest you've faced. CB Fry said of him that: "in the matter of pace he may be regarded either as a fast or fast-medium bowler. He certainly bowled faster some days than others; and on his fastest day he was distinctly fast."

And yet, as he brought his arm over, Barnes gave the ball an almighty rip. I'm not talking here about using seam and swing to extract cut from the pitch. I'm talking full-on spin, with a couple of special attributes. That is why John Arlott could say of Barnes: "He was a right-arm, fast-medium bowler with the accuracy, spin and resource of a slow bowler." Note that Arlott, who always chose his words carefully, describes Barnes not as medium or even medium-fast, but as fast-medium. And that he was a genuine, even prodigious, spinner of the ball is evidenced by Barnes' account of an extraordinary meeting with Noble.

Amol Rajan on the forgotten art of medium-pace spin | Cricket | ESPNcricinfo

 

[watson]

Barnes often opened the bowling and bowled medium-fast, but he did vary his pace depending on the conditions.

So when the pitch turned he tended to slow his pace and become a more conventional spinner.

Barnes could bowl everything and anything which is why he is an ATG ATG.

 

[Red]

Yeh, you can't really bowl fast spin. It's a law of diminishing returns sort of thing. Doesn't matter how much you rip/spin the ball, if you're arm action is really quick the ball isn't going to spin or turn in the way we imagine a conventional spinner turning the ball. It'll just skid on, surely. It can't grip at pace.

These days medium pace and spin bowling are two distinct schools, one incompatible with the other. But there has never been a more successful style of bowling than fast-medium spin, as purveyed by Barnes in particular. He was, John Arlott wrote, "a right-arm fast-medium bowler with the accuracy, spin and resource of a slow bowler". Barnes, "square shouldered as a tailor's model" as Alan Ross put it in his poem, is said to be by men who saw them both to have been around the same speed as Alec Bedser, which suggests he was bowling between 70 and 80mph. These days Swann is reckoned to bowl quickly for a spinner, and his average speed is around 60mph. Barnes's stock delivery was a fast leg break that swerved one way in the air and then span back the other off the pitch. He married this with a fast off break that did the exact reverse, a ball he was taught by the Australian Monty Noble, another early master of spin-swerve bowling. Barnes's particular release meant that the two were difficult to distinguish. He did not unfurl the wrist for his leg break, but rather ****ed it backwards and rotated it, as though he was, as Rajan says, "unscrewing a light bulb". If you want a more technical explanation, you can find one in Bob Woolmer's Art and Science of Cricket.

This method brought Barnes 189 Test wickets at 16.43 each, and universal recognition from his contemporaries as the greatest bowler of his era. It was the swerve that did it, movement akin to the drift you still see now in good spin bowling, only faster through the air. But this was genuine spin bowling – Barnes was outraged when David Frith once had the temerity to ask him if he cut the ball? "'Cut it?' He glared, and again I wondered if he might hurl something at me. 'I spun the ball!'" The great Australian batsmen Clem Hill remembered how a "ball pitched outside my leg-stump, safe to the push off my pads, I thought. Before I could 'pick up' my bat, my off-stump was knocked silly".

A few bowlers have dabbled in something similar since, notably Derek Underwood, but Barnes's is a type of bowling that is not used any more, though. Why is this? Partly it must be the pitches, which are so much better to bat on than they once were. Covers mean that there are no sticky dogs any more, and improved drainage and groundskeeping ensure that there will always be less help for the bowler. Partly it must be the coaching – Barnes only had three hours of the stuff in his entire life – which would frown on such unorthodoxies, pigeon-holing players into distinct categories and persuading them against bowling at medium-pace.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2011/may/17/the-spin-twirlymen-andy-bull

 

[Tom Flint]

Doesn't a quicker bowlers cutter spin?

 

[Red]

Doesn't a quicker bowlers cutter spin?

To a degree but not to the same degree as a slower bowler's ball would.

 

[watson]

Yeh, you can't really bowl fast spin. It's a law of diminishing returns sort of thing. Doesn't matter how much you rip/spin the ball, if you're arm action is really quick the ball isn't going to spin or turn in the way we imagine a conventional spinner turning the ball. It'll just skid on, surely. It can't grip at pace.

In 1999 Alec Bedser wrote to Ashley Mallet about his famous ball that clean bowled Bradman in 1947 - the one that pitched on leg and spun to hit the off-stump. Bradman reckoned it was the best ball he ever faced.

"Most fast bowlers pre-war bowled outswingers because of the lbw law [then in vogue]. The ball had to pitch [in line] stump to stump before an lbw appeal was upheld. Inswingers were rather frowned upon by the so-called experts - not many were bowled, so Don never really had to cope with the late inswing bowling and especially difficult was such a bowler who could also get the ball to move from leg to off after the ball pitched. I needed to develop such a ball. Today they call this a legcutter and because of the big seam on the ball these days it deviates upon pitching. Balls just after the war had hardly any seam, so I found I had to actually spin the ball. I found my big hands helped the process and that I did not have to change my action at all."

And

"I didn't want the ball to swing in, so I held it across the seam as if gripping the ball for a legbreak. When it pitched it went away off the track like a big-spinning legbreak. Obviously I had spun the ball. Sid looked down the pitch and said, 'What's bloody going on?' I walked back for the next ball, again holding the ball across the seam, and Peter Smith, an older Essex player fielding at mid-on, observed my grip and said, 'You can't hold a new ball like that.' Next ball I held it the same way and again it skipped off the pitch, just like a legbreak. It took me another 18 months to achieve the accuracy I wanted. Developing that ball confirmed what I had always believed - that bowlers should try things and think for themselves."

Ashley Mallett: When Bedser bowled the Don for a duck | Cricket | ESPNcricinfo

So it is possible to bowl spinner at 70 mph and still make it turn appreciably off the pitch if you believe both Bedser and Barnes.

I would imagine though that you would need a ton of revs and the right kind of softer pitch so the ball can bite momentarily into the turf.

 

[watson]

Incidently, Barnes, Tate and Bedser are reckoned to be England’s greatest medium paced bowlers because of their similarity.

But Tate was very different to both Barnes and Bedser. Tate’s extraordinary body action meant that his wicket taking ball was the classic out-swinger that ‘went late’. On-the-other-hand Barnes and Bedser took their wickets by using ‘swerve’ and spin.

1981
No batsman his master

John Arlott profiles a great and cheerful bowler - Maurice Tate

.......His best ball was the outswinger; though sometimes he made the ball go the other way. Harold Gilligan, who often captained him, thought that when Tate asked for another short leg he was beginning to tire. At his best he bowled to three slips, gully, third man, cover, mid-off, mid-on and square short leg. He always wanted his wicketkeeper standing up to the stumps - to aim at - which some found difficult; and was possible only because of his immense accuracy.

He has been likened to Alec Bedser and certainly they were both fast-medium bowlers; but technically they were quite different. Tate never commanded the leg-cutter as Bedser did. He bowled 'long-fingered"; seam between index and second fingers and, from his high action, let the ball do the rest.

http://www.espncricinfo.com/wcm/content/story/146415.html

 

[the big bambino]

LESS THAN 30 TESTS

01. Barry Richards
02. Vijay Merchant
03. George Headley
04. Graham Pollock
05. Vijay Hazare
06. Aubrey Faulkner
07. Mike Procter
08. Jock Cameron
09. Harold Larwood
10. Sydney Barnes
11. Bill O’Reilly


01. Bill Ponsford
02. Eddie Barlow
03. Kumar Ranjitsinhji
04. Seymour Nurse
05. Colin Bland
06. WG Grace
07. Denis Lindsay
08. Jack Gregory
09. Johnny Wardle
10. Fred Spofforth
11. Neil Adcock

Actually Tom Richardson would have to slot in somewhere come to think of it.

All three of them are basically leggies, with some difference in speed and variation.

I don't think they are. Unless you argue Bedser is like O'Reilly. Who was again different to your classical leg spinner. It doesn't matter if they were similar. For a batsman it would be like facing no peace from both ends. I think Faulkner's bowling record a bit patchy though he is definitely worth a spot in this team, no doubt. Just can't fit him in, especially over two players whose reputation is greater than his.

 

[bagapath]

Kumblesih probably...