Speed thrills, but what about the beauty of the perfect slower ball?

Have you seen Sam Curran's moon ball? It's a wondrous thing. A dipping, super slo-mo delivery that begs to be hit, if only you can adjust accordingly. A helium balloon that develops a puncture halfway down. A looping lollipop of doom. The ultimate sucker ball.

The trick with Curran's new variation, which he has been deploying to good effect in the Vitality Blast and ongoing Hundred, is that it comes out almost 50% slower than his usual 80mph stock ball. While most fast or medium-fast bowlers have change-ups that drop into the 60-70mph range, Curran is able to consistently bowl this version at around 45mph. It is so slow, that camera operators with years of training in tracking deliveries from side on can't keep the ball in the frame.

It got me thinking about the chef's-kiss beauty of a perfectly executed slower ball. Pace bowling is usually focused on pushing the speed gun higher, and we could talk for hours about the extreme demands of bowling at 90mph/145kph and above. But pace off at the right moment - and the sleight of hand required to do it well - can be just as compelling. Proof, too, that fast bowlers are thinking beasts.

As the great Ferris Bueller once said: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." And that wasn't just a warning for batters conditioned to play each and every delivery from a seam bowler as pace on.

The first time I can remember seeing a batter truly done by a slower ball was Chris Cairns' infamous dismissal of Chris Read at Lord's in 1999. Read, playing just his second Test, was so duped by what appeared at first to be a big full toss that he tried to duck it, only to be bowled between his legs.

If that was embarrassing for a player who struggled thereafter to prove his ability at Test level, then being a grizzled old salt is no protection either. The following summer, with Graham Thorpe making his return to the Test team at Old Trafford after a year out, he received this Courtney Walsh special first ball.

Even a halfway good slower ball can be iconic. Steven Harmison claimed his version was among the "worst in the history of the game", but the loopy legcutter that foxed Michael Clarke at Edgbaston in 2005 remains one of the balls of the century.

Obviously, the rise of T20 and power-hitting in general have made slower balls a stock part of the armoury - which in turn has led to a broadening of the genre. Whether the back-of-the-hand variations that made Jade Dernbach such a thrillingly chaotic presence with England in the early 2010s, the split-finger delivery, the one held back in the hand - and the now ubiquitous knuckle ball.

(You could doubtless do an entirely separate post on knuckle balls, but just look at this madness from Jofra Archer to Glenn Maxwell in the 2019 World Cup semi-final, which not only sees him change grip during load-up - question: how? - but was also the first time he had bowled it in a competitive scenario.)

For me, the slowie delivered in a Test still carries the potential for maximum bamboozlement, because it is least expected. I'll leave you with a couple of jaffas of recent vintage. You could call them offcutters, like the super-slow variation that Curran has been perfecting - but that would be like classifying the DeLorean as merely a motor car. There are many aspects to Jasprit Bumrah's god-like genius, including the freak twist of the wrist that skewers Shaun Marsh and Ollie Robinson. Slow done to perfection.