Taped ball cricket musings and then a bit more

Aqib Javed in the exquisitely written Rahul Bhattacharya book, Pundits from Pakistan, talks at length about the effects of taped ball games on cricket in Pakistan. It's a topic a few of us used to talk a lot about, in intense post-match discussions in Ottawa. Aqib makes a bunch of interesting points in the course of his treatise. Those will be taken up shortly. But, let me try building up some context first.

Like a lot of other cricket-mad, homesick sub-continental graduate students stuck on North American campuses, we used to play a fair amount of club cricket in Montreal. Which, surprisingly has (or had, I've heard it's down to two now) three divisions of around 10 teams each. Each team had a first division team and then a second division one. The games were played on weekends and on matting. Cricket was fairly intense, with occasional visits by some West Indian second rung first class players. We used to have a West Indian ex-under-20s team player as captain for a while. Methuen Isaac, very talented, I'm sure if he'd kept at cricket, rather than focus on Chemistry, he'd have come very close to senior West Indian team selection. He used to refer to Hooper and Lara as Carl and Brian, and I remember feeling an odd lump in the throat bowling to him. Back to taped ball cricket however.

Montreal didn't have much taped ball cricket, hardly any really. But, Ottawa was different. We had a lot of Pakistani friends, all software engineers inevitably. Ottawa is a bit like Bangalore in that sense. We had all kinds of India-Pakistan games, Nortel (10 Indians, one Pakistani) vs Alcatel (three-fourths Pakistani), a combined India-Pak team vs Jam-E-Umr or just plain India vs Pakistan, all taped ball and mostly in a Nortel parking lot. Taped ball, insulation taped, no slit in the tape as Rahul B describes in his book, but just one layer of tight insulation tape over a new fluffy Wilson tennis ball.

The Nortel parking lot was at a very slight incline, the bowler running up a minor slope. This might have enhanced the feeling that the parking lot pitch was an absolute belter. But, only by a bit. This parking lot surface is easily the toughest pitch any of us ever bowled on. Zero movement off the pitch, obviously, with a ball of no mentionable seam and an absolute rock hard pitching area. This is where you tried to land your front foot as close to the bowling crease as possible. Every centimetre seemed to make a difference.

If a batsman really got his eye in, it was very difficult to get him out. You could tie things down by bowling yorker-length, or go around the wicket and create an angle to stop the big swing to leg. But, the length had to be perfect either way. A tiny bit this way or that, and the ball would disappear into the woods at midwicket or straight back past you into the next parking lot. The taped ball made sure the hits went the distance. A batsman could hit through the line most of the time.

You could get swing if the tape got a bit damaged. Or the taping wasn't done properly. But, even with the swing, your length had to be close to perfect. Mis-hits very frequently went over the fence, or in our case, into the woods.

So, really, the parking lot pitch was a hard task master. You became a better bowler for the experience. You had to be a decent exponent of the yorker to survive. And, you learnt to keep the ball up around good length. Most of all, you had to keep mixing things up. The round the wicket line helped a lot. Also, you tried to bowl as quickly as possible, because if you erred in length, and bowled a bit slow, you held no hope. But, at a quicker pace (by club cricket standards, obviously), there was just a bit more room for error.

The basic problems you faced as a bowler with a non-taped tennis ball and a taped one were very similar, only the parking lot offering truer bounce was harder to bowl on.

Let us return now to Aqib Javed. The points he brings up in the course of his thesis on Pakistan's remarkable fast bowling strengths over the years (in sharp contrast with India's lack of the same): 1. Punjabi diet over the years has led to a taller and more well built population. 2. A beef-based diet promotes aggression. 3. Taped-ball cricket results in bowlers developing more muscle as a result of trying to bowl fast with a relatively light ball (lighter than the regular cricket ball, that is). 4. The presence of fast bowling idols.

Point 1 is a somewhat valid one in the sense that Punjabis and Pathans from the NWP on the average are of bigger build than the populace of the rest of the subcontinent. Imran and Waqar or even Shoaib aren't overly tall however, so at times, the point is a bit moot. I suspect Imran played a big part in encouraging young fast bowlers who got into the Pakistan team to work on their fitness and strength, so point 1 (from a point of view of physical strength) is more of a sort of corollary to point 4.

Point 2, we can quickly discount, because there is a lot of non-beef based food that are known to promote aggression. And, it is not as if beef would somehow promote aggression selectively only in bowlers. I remember watching a combination of Shoaib Mohammed, Rizwan-Uz-Zaman and Younis Ahmed in the mid-to-late eighties and nearly always, dozing off perfectly peacefully to the dull thud of dead bat on ball.

Point 4 is a very valid one obviously. And, I'll return to that in a bit.

Point 3 about fast bowlers developing muscle bowling with a taped ball is an interesting one. However, I'm not really sure whether it has had that serious an effect on the sustained development of fast bowling in Pakistan. Or at least, I'm not convinced bowling with a taped tennis ball has a different effect on your enthusiasm to bowl fast when young, in comparison with using a non-taped ball. Although better to bowl with than a new fluffy non-taped tennis ball, taped ball cricket is still heavily loaded in favour of the batsman. Especially when played in parking lots. It made you a more street-smart bowler yes, because you had to work out quickly how to contain a free-swinging batsman. You'd try bowling as quickly as possible, not because it encouraged you to, but because otherwise even the smallest error in length would be punished.

Most of this is the case with regular tennis ball cricket as well though, and generally since you used the same ball for a few weeks, the fluff would soon disappear and then you were left with something not hugely different from a taped ball in terms of speed through the air. Rahul B in his book talks about the joys of bowling with a taped tennis ball with a slit, because of the resultant swing. While swing definitely spurs a bowler on, equally, I somehow do not remember being discouraged trying to bowl fast with a regular tennis ball simply because you never thought you were bowling slow when you are a kid. In your mind, you were always Marshall, Imran or Holding. So, overall, bowling with any kind of tennis ball, is definitely useful in building early shoulder strength, and helps in learning how to bowl the yorker. But, the differences between the taped one and the non-taped one in terms of encouraging you to bowl fast, I'm not so sure about. That is, I'm not convinced that the early playing environs (taped ball vs non-taped ball) in Pakistan and India are really very different. And, generally, if you are good at bowling with one, you are good with the other as well.

Aqib talks about reverse swing in a different context, but I think it's a combination of point 4 plus reverse swing that has really sustained pace bowling in Pakistan. It is not really taped ball cricket, nor is it as much a question of raw physical strength. Marshall, Holding and Roberts were just as fast or at times faster (perhaps not as consistently scary I must admit) than Clarke, Croft and Garner. Theories of that sort are mostly cases of misplaced machismo. Nor, quite obviously is it as simple a matter as eating beef.

At the core, it is the fact that Imran bowled really fast and became very successful at doing it, that has sparked the fine array of fast bowlers in Pakistan since. This allied with the discovery of reverse swing. The effect that a fast, late deep inswinger sending a middle stump cartwheeling can have on a whole generation of young cricketers should not be underestimated. It's a lot like Gavaskar inspiring a whole generation of young Indian batsmen. Akram, Younis, Akhtar, Tendulkar, Laxman, Dravid and Sehwag, all driven indirectly or directly by inspiration. An Inzamam and a Pathan are slight aberrations to this inspirational rule. Why Imran took up fast bowling and Gavaskar became a batsman I'd like to put down to individual inclinations.

The other factor that has helped is Imran himself nurturing raw young talent from non-urban centres. The nurturing aspect finds a parallel in India with a whole host of excellent batting coaches. Fast bowlers are a sensitive lot. If not encouraged early, they quickly peter out into run-of-the-mill medium pacers. Similary with young batsmen. They quickly lose focus and motivation if not given enough attention.

This snowballing effect is obvious if you watch a game involving a random bunch of Indians and Pakistanis. On an average, the Pakistanis would have longer run-ups and the Indians would hold their pose longer after a checked straight drive. It is another matter, whether the long run-ups always result in faster bowlers or whether the straight-battedness would last. But, in a slightly rambling way, I will rest my case.