The return of the outswing

First up in his various interviews, Alastair Cook was keen to point out just how damn well his team had bowled. "Would not like to have battled against them myself," he said. This was dead right and served three purposes. One, to acknowledge his own. Two, to diffuse the almost certain suggestions of Sri Lanka's awfulness and the gulf between good and bad at Test level. Three, to further diffuse any idea that conditions were tailor made for his team. To help with that one, he added: "I would have batted first if I had won the toss."

He was cock-a-hoop about James Anderson's outswinger: primarily, I suppose, because it has been absent without leave. That is the trouble with the inswinger. Pay it too much attention and, oops, next thing you wonder why your first child is in a huff. A bowler most needs a stock ball. Master six of these in a row - over upon over - and then three years later, when you have finally nailed it, go to school on a variation.

It is what Bill O'Reilly told Richie Benaud about the legbreak and Benaud passed on to Shane Warne. O'Reilly said it would take three years. Benaud said that to Warne too. "But he did it in two, which proves just how good he was," added the great man. Warne stuck with the legbreak in its many guises, only occasionally resorting to the wrong'un, which he admitted he found difficult to both disguise and release accurately. In the first part of his career, he had a terrific flipper - ask Alec Stewart - but he struggled with it after his shoulder operation. Warne found fame and fortune through the virtue of his stock ball.

There is no one way to do these things. Perceived wisdom for outswing (assuming a right-arm bowler) is to deliver from side-on, looking over the left shoulder at the target and following through with the right arm working across the front of the body and away past the left hip. But many an outswing bowler has ignored the manual. Paramount is the position of the wrist at release, which must be behind the ball. Malcolm Marshall spent more time on the position of his wrist than anything else - though he would always say that too many bowlers ignored the value brought by good, strong use of the left arm in the follow-through. Anderson uses his left arm really well, keeping it tight to his chest and pulling it through the whole of the action at delivery.

I think Anderson had the seam mainly upright in this match, not canted towards first slip as has been the case for much of his career. Again, there is no wrong or right way. It might even be a daily variation. Tony Greig once asked Jack Nicklaus whether it was more advisable to play with a fade or a draw. Nicklaus said he danced in the shoes he was wearing and by that, Greigy reckoned, he meant if one is working first thing in the morning and the other is not, stick with the one that is!

Marshall liked the top half of his forefinger and middle finger resting lightly on the ball and his thumb tucked underneath it. He rarely canted the seam though if nothing was going, he would fiddle about with variations. It is more usual to set the thumb alongside the ball but he didn't find that gave him a rudder. Many other good swing bowlers have the ball set further into the hand and the fingers wider apart. Anderson grips it more like Marshall in the fingers but is more orthodox with his thumb. I'm only banging on about this to show how small are the margins and how crucial is the detail.

The Burnley boy, who started out for England as just a kid with an extravagant haircut and a crazy dream, has now taken more Test wickets than any other swing bowler in the history of the game: 442 of them to be precise, eight more than Kapil Dev whom he shot past on Friday. Ahead of him on the list are Muttiah Muralitharan, Warne and Anil Kumble - all out of sight - and Glenn McGrath (563) and Courtney Walsh (519) - both in reach, at a stretch.

Two days before the match, Anderson and Stuart Broad played golf with Joe Root and with hmmm, forgotten, but it is not relevant. Afterwards, they sat down and had a yarn about their most unsatisfactory records at Headingley. They threw a few theories about, came up with next to nothing and decided to swop ends. "It only took us nine years to work it out," said Anderson. "And for me to bowl a really full length," admitted Broad. Why bowling up a slope or down a slope makes a difference to swing, I have no idea. It probably doesn't, it is more likely a case of feeling comfortable and letting go.

Given Anderson's best figures in 13 years at Fred Trueman's favourite ground yielded three wickets for 91 runs, you could be forgiven for thinking he simply had a mental block. One sure thing about swing is that it won't go if the purveyor of the product is up tight.

Broad's point about the fuller length is more understandable than it might sound. I mean, at that level should not the lad know better than to bowl too short? Not necessarily, for he is responding to the in-built mechanism of self-defence born of captaincy, and reference to figures, that hates conceding runs. Not all of Headingley's pitches move around quite so much as this one did and, anyway, it was probably more the skies than the soil.

Consequently, when conditions are less favourable the bowlers retreat, especially the faster ones who simply hate being driven down the ground. As this column noted on Friday, Michael Vaughan says there is no place at which he has played where the conditions change more suddenly from good to bad for both batsmen and bowler. Broad and Anderson have instinctively deployed the lengths they use elsewhere to build pressure on the modern power-playing batsman. That just does not hack it at Headingley.

One final thing, Anderson bowled faster in this match than in recent memory. Almost certainly, the matches he has played for Lancashire this season have given rhythm and confidence. The ball spat from the surface, making the hapless batsmen nervy about their footwork. The odd short ball worked well because it was sharper in pace and pitched so as to reach the opponent at chest or throat height. Nasty. Yes, that's it, nasty. He had his outswing back for sure, and his menace was back too.