Grand rapids

One hundred years ago, George Hirst, the Yorkshire fast bowler and allrounder, scored 2385 runs in an English season; he also claimed 208 wickets. Asked if his feat would be emulated, Hirst said, "If anyone does it, he will be very tired." It is a line that has been credited to the late Fred Trueman, who repeated it after becoming the first bowler to claim 300 Test wickets. Either fast bowlers know their cricket history well, or they dip into a common pool of one-liners.

When Richard Hadlee became the first to take 400 Test wickets, he was asked about a possible knighthood. "Who was the last bowler to be knighted?" he asked. "Sir Francis Drake, wasn't it?" Wonderful line, except that the Australian spinner Arthur Mailey had used it more than three decades earlier. The reference is to Drake's insistence on completing a game of bowls before taking on the Spanish armada in the 16th century.

The best books on fast bowling are anecdotal, character-driven, and written by those who haven't actually faced their subjects across 22 yards. This gives their writing a strange objectivity that would be missing if a batsman wrote the books. In David Frith's delightful The Fast Men John Arlott comments in the preface: "The fast bowler is the most colourful character in cricket but all too little print has been devoted to the breed." Arlott himself wrote one of the best, Fred, on Trueman.

In recent years, the quickest of them - Frank Tyson, Trueman, Dennis Lillee, Michael Holding, Peter Pollock - have also been articulate thinkers on the game. The Surrey coach Stewart Storey once wrote that "the thicker you are, the better your chances of becoming a quick bowler." This is nonsense. The ones who hurl the ball and leave it to nature to do their work don't last. "To bowl fast," wrote Tyson in A Typhoon Called Tyson, "is to revel in the glad animal action, to thrill in physical power and to enjoy a certain sneaking feeling of superiority over the mortals who play the game."

There is no sight in cricket to match the raw aggression of the fast bowler as he charges in and sends the stumps cartwheeling. The batsman's reaction is exemplified by Tony Lewis, going out to face Wes Hall for Glamorgan against West Indies in 1963: "It was the first time two batsmen have ever crossed in the toilet." The best-known quote, of course is Maurice Leyland's "None of us likes fast bowling, but some of us don't let on."

Intimidation comes naturally to the fast bowler. "I try to hit a batsman in the rib cage, and I want it to hurt so much that the batsman doesn't want to face me any more," wrote Lillee in Back to the Mark. Harold Larwood, whose bowling still provokes books seven decades after "Bodyline was devised to stifle Bradman's genius" says at the end of The Larwood Story, "I am glad to this day that I never apologised."

It is difficult to imagine Lillee as anything but an intimidating fast bowler. Likewise with Trueman, who begins his autobiography Ball of Fire thus:

Fast bowling, cricket's greatest sight is sometimes accompanied by chucking, cricket's greatest confusion. Straight from the Shoulder by Ian Peebles and Thrown Out by Ian Meckiff cover the ground best. Meckiff was called in Brisbane in his 18th Test match, and never played first-class cricket again.

In every generation, old stories are told about new bowlers, wrote Arlott. Not just about, but by them too, if they know their history well enough.