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How Pakistan became the kings of swing
In the first of three exclusive extracts from his brilliant new book, Peter Oborne reveals the genesis of an often controversial bowling style that has revolutionised cricket
The master: Sarfraz Nawaz is widely acclaimed as the inventor of reverse swing Photo: Patrick Eager
By Peter Oborne
10:00PM BST 12 Jul 2014
Throughout its history, cricket has seen dramatic innovations in technique which shocked the establishment and changed the nature of the game forever. Round-arm bowling was the first, followed not long after by overarm. In batting, WG Grace astonished contemporaries by playing equally well off the back foot as off the front.
At the end of the 19th century, Ranjitsinhji’s leg glance, and then, in Australia, the hooks and pulls of Clem Hill and Victor Trumper, opened up half the field for batsmen to score in (Ranji’s friend and contemporary CB Fry was expected to apologise at school if he scored from a leg-side hit).
In the same era, BJT Bosanquet’s casual invention of the googly, experimenting with a tennis ball on a billiard table, gave a new weapon to spin bowlers. Before the Great War, SF Barnes, the greatest bowler of all time, discovered how to spin the ball sharply at medium pace (although this technique has proved too difficult for almost any bowler since).
The next surprise in bowling was the “chinaman” – the mirror image of a leg-break, the stock delivery of a left-arm wrist spinner. It entered the cricket lexicon in 1933 after a racist complaint by one of its early victims. “Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman,” grumbled England’s Walter Robins, stumped in 1933 off a rather ordinary West Indian bowler called Ellis “Puss” Achong. Garry Sobers bowled the chinaman in his early career, and more recently Paul Adams of South Africa beguiled batsmen and spectators with his unique “frog-in-a-blender” action.
The 1950s produced a couple of “mystery” bowlers – Jack Iverson of Australia and Sonny Ramadhin of West Indies, but they did not leave a legacy for others. The next great bowling inventors were Pakistanis. For spinners, Saqlain Mushtaq introduced the “doosra” (meaning “the other one” or “the second”), a concealed leg-break. This has had its share of controversy, but nothing has caused more agitation, accusations and ultimately imitation, than Pakistan’s reinvention of fast bowling through the phenomenon of reverse swing.
This made-in-Pakistan technique upset long-established theory and practice in the art of swing bowling. In doing so, it dramatically tilted the balance of power from batsman to bowler, in three different ways. In conventional swing, the shine on the ball gives a warning to the batsman of how the ball will deviate in the air. When a right-handed batsman sees the shine on the right side of the ball, he or she expects an outswinger which moves away from him or her. In reverse swing, the ball suddenly moves in to the right-hander although the shine is still on the right side of the ball on release.
In conventional swing, the ball swings most when it is new. Reverse swing happens – unpredictably – when the ball is old. In conventional swing, bowlers face a trade-off between swing and speed. In reverse swing, the ball actually swings more at higher speeds, particularly when the bowler achieves a yorker length. A Test batsman has to cope with a ball at 85mph or more which at the last moment spears in at his feet or the base of his stumps. This is hard enough now, when reverse swing has become familiar. In the 1980s it seemed devilish – and its origins gave some of its victims another opportunity to display their prejudices against Pakistan and its cricketers.
The name most often cited as the inventor of reverse swing is Sarfraz Nawaz, the tall, often idiosyncratic but always thoughtful opening bowler who took 177 wickets for Pakistan in a 55-Test career from 1969 to 1984. However, as with Bosanquet and his googly, there are other claimants. Several sources mention the name of Farrakh Khan, a leading light of the Lahore Gymkhana in the late 1950s and 1960s, and suggest that he passed the secret to the young Sarfraz.
Professor Dr Farrakh Khan was a member of the Burki clan – the Pashtun dynasty famous for achievement in sport, education, the armed forces and public service and a cousin to three Pakistan cricket captains, Javed Burki, Majid Khan and Imran Khan. He was a promising opening bowler and a batsman with sound technique, who was good enough to be chosen as one of the promising young cricketers on the Pakistan Eaglets tour of England in 1959 under the captaincy of Saeed Ahmed. Competition from other opening bowlers and lack of Test match opportunities for Pakistan in that era led him to give up regular cricket and follow a distinguished medical career: his knowledge and contacts proved vital to the career of his cousin Imran, when he helped him get the right treatment for the fractured shin which nearly crippled him for life.
Farrakh Khan shared his memories of the 1959 Eaglets tour with me. His main success was as a batsman, who watched his colleagues, including Saeed Ahmed, fail repeatedly on English wickets by trying to force the ball off the front foot. He thought it better to stay on the back foot. He passed the tip to his captain, who promptly invited him to prove it by opening the batting in the next match against Derbyshire. He scored 80 out of 120 and kept his place for the rest of the tour.
Competing with six or seven other seam bowlers, Farrakh Khan decided he needed more variety in his bowling and sought out Alf Gover, the former Surrey and England fast bowler and legendary coach, who had long been a mentor to young Pakistanis. “I met him at the Richmond Club nets and said I could only bowl the outswinger. He taught me how to bowl the inswinger as well.” His first victim with the new delivery was an august one – Lala Amarnath, player-manager of the Indian Starlets visiting Pakistan in 1960–61. “I clean bowled him.” His delight was still there, over 50 years later, and he demonstrated the grip.
He continued to use the inswinger with success in Lahore club cricket, and in 1966, in the Lahore Gymkhana nets, he showed it to a 17-year-old Sarfraz Nawaz. “I think he made some further developments.”
It would be piquant to think that Gover was the ultimate source of the bowling technique which destroyed so many English batsmen in the 1980s and 1990s. However, what Farrakh Khan described and demonstrated to me appeared to be conventional inswing, and this was confirmed by Sarfraz when I spoke to him at the cricket academy he has created at Islamabad.
Somewhat stouter than in his playing days, Sarfraz Nawaz has a bearlike quality. He speaks softly (Wasim Bari told me that on his first England tour he needed a throat operation before he could appeal. He whispered his ‘“Owzat?” and had to gesture to ask his team-mates to support him). He has an engaging catchphrase, “and all that kind of thing”, which sometimes emerges in curious places (“the crowd were charging us with sticks and steel bars and all that kind of thing”).
Sarfraz was a late developer as a cricketer. He never played at school before matriculation and did not take up the game until his late teens when he began working for his father’s construction company in Lahore. His conversion to cricket was a result of Pakistan’s 1965 war with India over Kashmir. It led to the suspension of a major civilian contract for his father’s company. The construction workers who were made idle invited the tall (6ft 4in) son of their employer to join their pickup cricket matches. He proved a natural, and soon he got a trial at the prestigious Government College, in Lahore, and regular club cricket. He confirmed that he did learn in the nets with Farrakh Khan but added “he did not bowl reverse swing but in-cutters. He did not know about reverse swing, or he would have bowled it himself.”
Always an analyst, Sarfraz discovered reverse swing by bowling with balls of all conditions, new, semi-new and old. He began on matting wickets, where he could cut the ball. “One day I shone one side of a very old ball and it swung. It was rough on both sides but I shone one side and it swung towards the shine – it should not have done this.” In that Eureka moment, reverse swing was born. He refined the new technique at the Mozang Link Cricket Club in Lahore. His opening partner Saleem Mir also knew how to reverse swing, but they kept it a secret from other bowlers.
Like other talented teenagers, Sarfraz moved rapidly through the ranks of Pakistan cricket. In 1967 he made his first-class debut in the socially important annual match between Punjab University and the Punjab Governor’s XI. He went wicketless and did not bat for the Governor’s XI, but he played a major role for Lahore in their first-innings win over Karachi in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy final of 1968–69.
Sarfraz’s big break came in that season when he was asked to bowl in the nets at Lahore against the visiting MCC tourists. Roger Prideaux, the experienced 29-year-old opener, Cambridge Blue and captain of Northamptonshire, became the first English batsman to be surprised by reverse swing. He was impressed enough to invite Sarfraz to join his county.
For years, he kept the secret of reverse swing from everyone except his old opening partner in Pakistan, Saleem Mir. (It did not help Saleem Mir very much; in eight first-class matches he took just eight wickets at an average over 40. Reverse swing has always required high-quality bowling, which is why Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis stood far higher than other exponents.) The technique was not much use to Sarfraz in England, where the ball did not get as rough as in Pakistan, and he usually employed conventional swing there. His Northamptonshire team-mate and future captain, Mushtaq Mohammad, was aware of reverse swing but rarely saw it and had no idea how it was achieved.
Finally, Sarfraz gave the secret to another Test player. During a one-day match in Guyana on Pakistan’s 1976–77 tour of West Indies, he reverse-swung the old ball, and mystified his partner, Imran Khan. “He complained, ‘Your ball is moving but mine won’t.’ He did not know that I was roughing both sides of the ball on the last ball of my overs – so that it could not swing for him!” Sarfraz is still delighted with his ruse over 40 years later. “I told him I would show him in the nets, not in a match.”
The next day he kept his word. The secret was to keep the ball rough on one side and make it heavier on the other with spit and sweat. It would make the ball move sharply towards the shine and unlike conventional swing the effect could be achieved at speed. “I only told Imran because he was not then playing domestic cricket in Pakistan.”
I asked him if he used reverse swing for his greatest spell of bowling – seven wickets for one run which destroyed the Australians at Melbourne in March 1979. It gave him innings figures of nine for 86, the second-best Test performance by any Pakistani bowler and the best away from home. “No. It was conventional swing and line and length.”
There were also some misjudgments by Australian batsmen. “I bowled Dav Whatmore round his legs,” Sarfraz gloated. (Whatmore, who opened that day, later became Pakistan’s coach.)
I have watched low-quality recordings of his great performance and there are no signs of reverse swing. Most of the Australian batsmen were undone off the pitch. Sarfraz was adamant that he obtained reverse swing by legal methods – exploiting dry pitches, especially in Pakistan, to create the required condition for the ball, and that he coached his bowling partners and fielders in how to shine the ball (legally) and how to return it. “It is not necessary to gouge or scrape the ball, as English people claim. They did not know that a ball can do this when it gets older.”
However, he was also frank about illegal methods. He mentioned Imran Khan’s admission that he had used a bottle top in an English county game, but also reeled off a number of other leading players. Unfortunately, Sarfraz’s conversation is regularly defamatory. “X, who played under me, was the first to use the bottle top. He passed the secret to Y and Z, and the ball started to go every way. They needed help. There are many methods to work on the ball illegally. X had a zip with iron teeth in his back pocket. One umpire asked him to remove his trousers. Sometimes players put glue on the ball.” X, Y and Z were all Pakistan Test players.
As often happens, the heirs to the inventor obtained more profit from his invention than he did. Imran Khan told his biographer Christopher Sandford that he first used reverse swing against Australia in the Melbourne Test of 1977. In the first innings, with conventional methods, he had no wickets for 117 in 22 eight-ball overs. In Australia’s second innings “the pitch had got so hard it began to take lumps out of the ball, which then behaved like a boomerang”. He took five for 122 (his first five-wicket haul in a Test innings), three bowled and one lbw. A characteristic of successful reverse-swing spells is a high concentration of bowled and lbws.
Imran’s greatest spell of reverse swing came against India in the second Test at Karachi in December 1982. Trailing by 283, India were making a fight of their second innings as Sunil Gavaskar and Dilip Vengsarkar had a long second-wicket partnership of 74 which took them to 102 for one on a flat wicket.
Imran then returned for his second spell with the ball around 40 overs old. In the next 25 balls he took five wickets for eight runs. The normally impregnable Gavaskar was bowled through the gate. The experienced and accomplished Gundappa Viswanath was bowled shouldering arms to a late-reversing ball he expected to pass outside his off-stump. Imran went on to claim eight for 60, his second-best performance in a Test innings. Five were bowled and two lbw – a marker of reverse swing. He was watched by his mentor, Sarfraz, by then Pakistan’s third seamer.
The next great exponent of reverse swing, Wasim Akram, had the kind of debut that makes Pakistani teenagers dream. As a left-handed all-rounder he had not even been able to make the first team at Islamia College, Lahore. However, in November 1984 he was spotted in an
under-19 practice net by Javed Miandad who recommended him immediately for a trial match against the visiting New Zealanders. At Rawalpindi (one of Pakistan’s least friendly surfaces for fast bowlers) he took seven for 50 in the first innings. He was swept into the party for the return tour by Pakistan of New Zealand, displacing the unlucky Tahir Naqqash who had already been selected.
He did nothing special in his first Test at Auckland but took 10 wickets in the next one at Dunedin. There is no mention of reverse swing in accounts of this performance. Wasim’s own account is tempered by his frustration at failing to break the epic ninth-wicket partnership between Jeremy Coney and Ewen Chatfield which won New Zealand the match and the series.
Imran was his mentor. By now Sarfraz Nawaz had retired, and Imran had become the keeper of reverse swing. He certainly passed its secrets to his protégé, but Wasim’s autobiography focuses more on Imran’s basic lessons: sorting out his run-up, bowling conventional late swing, achieving yorkers at will and above all, stamina. He told him “You have to work like a dog, Wasim.”
The third of the great Pakistani exponents of reverse swing – Waqar Younis – was yet another teenage prodigy to be fast-streamed into the international team. He was discovered on television. Imran Khan watched him in the Super Wills Cup (between the best domestic teams in Pakistan and India) in 1987-88 and was impressed enough to go to the ground the next day and pick him for Pakistan’s forthcoming series against India.
He made his Test debut one day before his 18th birthday – and dismissed another teenaged debutant, Sachin Tendulkar. High pace earned him four wickets and he soon consolidated a place in the side.
The historian of reverse swing encounters two major problems. First, its three great exponents were masters of every weapon in fast bowling. They could “work over” batsmen with sheer speed, they could bowl bouncers and yorkers at will, and above all, they could make the ball swing fast and late by conventional means. Most of the great innovations in cricket are evident to the observer – such as overarm bowling, Ranji’s leg glance, Bosanquet’s googly – although the method used to produce them may be a mystery. Reverse swing does not announce itself so obviously. Without the aid of close-up analysis it might be conventional swing bowled exceptionally well.
Second, its three great exponents said relatively little about it. Most of cricket’s bowling innovators were not shy about their discoveries. Bosanquet was happy for Australians to call his delivery a “bosie” before the more exotic name of “googly” became established. In the modern era, Saqlain Mushtaq exploited the mystique of his “doosra” and even claimed a further invention, the “teesra”, matched by Shane Warne’s announcement of the ‘“zooter”.
Imran, Wasim and Waqar let their wickets speak for themselves. They rarely, if ever, attributed their victims to reverse swing.
Of the three, Wasim Akram has written the most about it. However, in his autobiography his proudest reverse swing performance is not from a Test match but in the ‘Roses’ match for Lancashire against Yorkshire in his first English county championship season, in 1989.
His thoughts could serve as a template for the reaction of all Englishmen to being overtaken by a foreign innovator – and not just in sport.
“[This was] the first time that the English public saw what reverse swing was about ... I understand that Fred Trueman was amazed at the amount of late swing I was getting.
"It was no great secret as far as I was concerned. In the nets I’d worked hard at perfecting late swing from around the wicket, making my body turn more into a sideways position so that I could get the ball to move in the air. I’d told my Lancashire team-mates about the ideal conditions to get the ball to reverse: dry, hot, with the ball roughed up one side after about 40 overs’ use – and yet I was the only one using that technique at the time in English cricket ... I was surprised that my colleagues didn’t try to experiment with reverse swing when it was obviously working for me, but during that period they kept talking about line and length, about bowling in the ‘corridor of uncertainty’ on or about off stump.
"That was all very well against average players on wickets that helped the bowler, but when you come up against batsmen on flat wickets they’ll just whip such deliveries through mid wicket all day. Six of my 10 victims were clean bowled in that match and it was simply a case of utilising ideal weather for reverse swing. A few more years were to pass before English bowlers began to see the value of this technique.”
It is fair to say that the cricket world did not really take notice of reverse swing until its victims started to complain about it.
‘Wounded Tiger’ by Peter Oborne (Simon and Schuster, rrp £25) is available at £20 + £1.95 p&p from Telegraph Books on 0844 871 1515 or at books.telegraph.co.uk
In the first of three exclusive extracts from his brilliant new book, Peter Oborne reveals the genesis of an often controversial bowling style that has revolutionised cricket
The master: Sarfraz Nawaz is widely acclaimed as the inventor of reverse swing Photo: Patrick Eager
By Peter Oborne
10:00PM BST 12 Jul 2014
Throughout its history, cricket has seen dramatic innovations in technique which shocked the establishment and changed the nature of the game forever. Round-arm bowling was the first, followed not long after by overarm. In batting, WG Grace astonished contemporaries by playing equally well off the back foot as off the front.
At the end of the 19th century, Ranjitsinhji’s leg glance, and then, in Australia, the hooks and pulls of Clem Hill and Victor Trumper, opened up half the field for batsmen to score in (Ranji’s friend and contemporary CB Fry was expected to apologise at school if he scored from a leg-side hit).
In the same era, BJT Bosanquet’s casual invention of the googly, experimenting with a tennis ball on a billiard table, gave a new weapon to spin bowlers. Before the Great War, SF Barnes, the greatest bowler of all time, discovered how to spin the ball sharply at medium pace (although this technique has proved too difficult for almost any bowler since).
The next surprise in bowling was the “chinaman” – the mirror image of a leg-break, the stock delivery of a left-arm wrist spinner. It entered the cricket lexicon in 1933 after a racist complaint by one of its early victims. “Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman,” grumbled England’s Walter Robins, stumped in 1933 off a rather ordinary West Indian bowler called Ellis “Puss” Achong. Garry Sobers bowled the chinaman in his early career, and more recently Paul Adams of South Africa beguiled batsmen and spectators with his unique “frog-in-a-blender” action.
The 1950s produced a couple of “mystery” bowlers – Jack Iverson of Australia and Sonny Ramadhin of West Indies, but they did not leave a legacy for others. The next great bowling inventors were Pakistanis. For spinners, Saqlain Mushtaq introduced the “doosra” (meaning “the other one” or “the second”), a concealed leg-break. This has had its share of controversy, but nothing has caused more agitation, accusations and ultimately imitation, than Pakistan’s reinvention of fast bowling through the phenomenon of reverse swing.
This made-in-Pakistan technique upset long-established theory and practice in the art of swing bowling. In doing so, it dramatically tilted the balance of power from batsman to bowler, in three different ways. In conventional swing, the shine on the ball gives a warning to the batsman of how the ball will deviate in the air. When a right-handed batsman sees the shine on the right side of the ball, he or she expects an outswinger which moves away from him or her. In reverse swing, the ball suddenly moves in to the right-hander although the shine is still on the right side of the ball on release.
In conventional swing, the ball swings most when it is new. Reverse swing happens – unpredictably – when the ball is old. In conventional swing, bowlers face a trade-off between swing and speed. In reverse swing, the ball actually swings more at higher speeds, particularly when the bowler achieves a yorker length. A Test batsman has to cope with a ball at 85mph or more which at the last moment spears in at his feet or the base of his stumps. This is hard enough now, when reverse swing has become familiar. In the 1980s it seemed devilish – and its origins gave some of its victims another opportunity to display their prejudices against Pakistan and its cricketers.
The name most often cited as the inventor of reverse swing is Sarfraz Nawaz, the tall, often idiosyncratic but always thoughtful opening bowler who took 177 wickets for Pakistan in a 55-Test career from 1969 to 1984. However, as with Bosanquet and his googly, there are other claimants. Several sources mention the name of Farrakh Khan, a leading light of the Lahore Gymkhana in the late 1950s and 1960s, and suggest that he passed the secret to the young Sarfraz.
Professor Dr Farrakh Khan was a member of the Burki clan – the Pashtun dynasty famous for achievement in sport, education, the armed forces and public service and a cousin to three Pakistan cricket captains, Javed Burki, Majid Khan and Imran Khan. He was a promising opening bowler and a batsman with sound technique, who was good enough to be chosen as one of the promising young cricketers on the Pakistan Eaglets tour of England in 1959 under the captaincy of Saeed Ahmed. Competition from other opening bowlers and lack of Test match opportunities for Pakistan in that era led him to give up regular cricket and follow a distinguished medical career: his knowledge and contacts proved vital to the career of his cousin Imran, when he helped him get the right treatment for the fractured shin which nearly crippled him for life.
Farrakh Khan shared his memories of the 1959 Eaglets tour with me. His main success was as a batsman, who watched his colleagues, including Saeed Ahmed, fail repeatedly on English wickets by trying to force the ball off the front foot. He thought it better to stay on the back foot. He passed the tip to his captain, who promptly invited him to prove it by opening the batting in the next match against Derbyshire. He scored 80 out of 120 and kept his place for the rest of the tour.
Competing with six or seven other seam bowlers, Farrakh Khan decided he needed more variety in his bowling and sought out Alf Gover, the former Surrey and England fast bowler and legendary coach, who had long been a mentor to young Pakistanis. “I met him at the Richmond Club nets and said I could only bowl the outswinger. He taught me how to bowl the inswinger as well.” His first victim with the new delivery was an august one – Lala Amarnath, player-manager of the Indian Starlets visiting Pakistan in 1960–61. “I clean bowled him.” His delight was still there, over 50 years later, and he demonstrated the grip.
He continued to use the inswinger with success in Lahore club cricket, and in 1966, in the Lahore Gymkhana nets, he showed it to a 17-year-old Sarfraz Nawaz. “I think he made some further developments.”
It would be piquant to think that Gover was the ultimate source of the bowling technique which destroyed so many English batsmen in the 1980s and 1990s. However, what Farrakh Khan described and demonstrated to me appeared to be conventional inswing, and this was confirmed by Sarfraz when I spoke to him at the cricket academy he has created at Islamabad.
Somewhat stouter than in his playing days, Sarfraz Nawaz has a bearlike quality. He speaks softly (Wasim Bari told me that on his first England tour he needed a throat operation before he could appeal. He whispered his ‘“Owzat?” and had to gesture to ask his team-mates to support him). He has an engaging catchphrase, “and all that kind of thing”, which sometimes emerges in curious places (“the crowd were charging us with sticks and steel bars and all that kind of thing”).
Sarfraz was a late developer as a cricketer. He never played at school before matriculation and did not take up the game until his late teens when he began working for his father’s construction company in Lahore. His conversion to cricket was a result of Pakistan’s 1965 war with India over Kashmir. It led to the suspension of a major civilian contract for his father’s company. The construction workers who were made idle invited the tall (6ft 4in) son of their employer to join their pickup cricket matches. He proved a natural, and soon he got a trial at the prestigious Government College, in Lahore, and regular club cricket. He confirmed that he did learn in the nets with Farrakh Khan but added “he did not bowl reverse swing but in-cutters. He did not know about reverse swing, or he would have bowled it himself.”
Always an analyst, Sarfraz discovered reverse swing by bowling with balls of all conditions, new, semi-new and old. He began on matting wickets, where he could cut the ball. “One day I shone one side of a very old ball and it swung. It was rough on both sides but I shone one side and it swung towards the shine – it should not have done this.” In that Eureka moment, reverse swing was born. He refined the new technique at the Mozang Link Cricket Club in Lahore. His opening partner Saleem Mir also knew how to reverse swing, but they kept it a secret from other bowlers.
Like other talented teenagers, Sarfraz moved rapidly through the ranks of Pakistan cricket. In 1967 he made his first-class debut in the socially important annual match between Punjab University and the Punjab Governor’s XI. He went wicketless and did not bat for the Governor’s XI, but he played a major role for Lahore in their first-innings win over Karachi in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy final of 1968–69.
Sarfraz’s big break came in that season when he was asked to bowl in the nets at Lahore against the visiting MCC tourists. Roger Prideaux, the experienced 29-year-old opener, Cambridge Blue and captain of Northamptonshire, became the first English batsman to be surprised by reverse swing. He was impressed enough to invite Sarfraz to join his county.
For years, he kept the secret of reverse swing from everyone except his old opening partner in Pakistan, Saleem Mir. (It did not help Saleem Mir very much; in eight first-class matches he took just eight wickets at an average over 40. Reverse swing has always required high-quality bowling, which is why Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis stood far higher than other exponents.) The technique was not much use to Sarfraz in England, where the ball did not get as rough as in Pakistan, and he usually employed conventional swing there. His Northamptonshire team-mate and future captain, Mushtaq Mohammad, was aware of reverse swing but rarely saw it and had no idea how it was achieved.
Finally, Sarfraz gave the secret to another Test player. During a one-day match in Guyana on Pakistan’s 1976–77 tour of West Indies, he reverse-swung the old ball, and mystified his partner, Imran Khan. “He complained, ‘Your ball is moving but mine won’t.’ He did not know that I was roughing both sides of the ball on the last ball of my overs – so that it could not swing for him!” Sarfraz is still delighted with his ruse over 40 years later. “I told him I would show him in the nets, not in a match.”
The next day he kept his word. The secret was to keep the ball rough on one side and make it heavier on the other with spit and sweat. It would make the ball move sharply towards the shine and unlike conventional swing the effect could be achieved at speed. “I only told Imran because he was not then playing domestic cricket in Pakistan.”
I asked him if he used reverse swing for his greatest spell of bowling – seven wickets for one run which destroyed the Australians at Melbourne in March 1979. It gave him innings figures of nine for 86, the second-best Test performance by any Pakistani bowler and the best away from home. “No. It was conventional swing and line and length.”
There were also some misjudgments by Australian batsmen. “I bowled Dav Whatmore round his legs,” Sarfraz gloated. (Whatmore, who opened that day, later became Pakistan’s coach.)
I have watched low-quality recordings of his great performance and there are no signs of reverse swing. Most of the Australian batsmen were undone off the pitch. Sarfraz was adamant that he obtained reverse swing by legal methods – exploiting dry pitches, especially in Pakistan, to create the required condition for the ball, and that he coached his bowling partners and fielders in how to shine the ball (legally) and how to return it. “It is not necessary to gouge or scrape the ball, as English people claim. They did not know that a ball can do this when it gets older.”
However, he was also frank about illegal methods. He mentioned Imran Khan’s admission that he had used a bottle top in an English county game, but also reeled off a number of other leading players. Unfortunately, Sarfraz’s conversation is regularly defamatory. “X, who played under me, was the first to use the bottle top. He passed the secret to Y and Z, and the ball started to go every way. They needed help. There are many methods to work on the ball illegally. X had a zip with iron teeth in his back pocket. One umpire asked him to remove his trousers. Sometimes players put glue on the ball.” X, Y and Z were all Pakistan Test players.
As often happens, the heirs to the inventor obtained more profit from his invention than he did. Imran Khan told his biographer Christopher Sandford that he first used reverse swing against Australia in the Melbourne Test of 1977. In the first innings, with conventional methods, he had no wickets for 117 in 22 eight-ball overs. In Australia’s second innings “the pitch had got so hard it began to take lumps out of the ball, which then behaved like a boomerang”. He took five for 122 (his first five-wicket haul in a Test innings), three bowled and one lbw. A characteristic of successful reverse-swing spells is a high concentration of bowled and lbws.
Imran’s greatest spell of reverse swing came against India in the second Test at Karachi in December 1982. Trailing by 283, India were making a fight of their second innings as Sunil Gavaskar and Dilip Vengsarkar had a long second-wicket partnership of 74 which took them to 102 for one on a flat wicket.
Imran then returned for his second spell with the ball around 40 overs old. In the next 25 balls he took five wickets for eight runs. The normally impregnable Gavaskar was bowled through the gate. The experienced and accomplished Gundappa Viswanath was bowled shouldering arms to a late-reversing ball he expected to pass outside his off-stump. Imran went on to claim eight for 60, his second-best performance in a Test innings. Five were bowled and two lbw – a marker of reverse swing. He was watched by his mentor, Sarfraz, by then Pakistan’s third seamer.
The next great exponent of reverse swing, Wasim Akram, had the kind of debut that makes Pakistani teenagers dream. As a left-handed all-rounder he had not even been able to make the first team at Islamia College, Lahore. However, in November 1984 he was spotted in an
under-19 practice net by Javed Miandad who recommended him immediately for a trial match against the visiting New Zealanders. At Rawalpindi (one of Pakistan’s least friendly surfaces for fast bowlers) he took seven for 50 in the first innings. He was swept into the party for the return tour by Pakistan of New Zealand, displacing the unlucky Tahir Naqqash who had already been selected.
He did nothing special in his first Test at Auckland but took 10 wickets in the next one at Dunedin. There is no mention of reverse swing in accounts of this performance. Wasim’s own account is tempered by his frustration at failing to break the epic ninth-wicket partnership between Jeremy Coney and Ewen Chatfield which won New Zealand the match and the series.
Imran was his mentor. By now Sarfraz Nawaz had retired, and Imran had become the keeper of reverse swing. He certainly passed its secrets to his protégé, but Wasim’s autobiography focuses more on Imran’s basic lessons: sorting out his run-up, bowling conventional late swing, achieving yorkers at will and above all, stamina. He told him “You have to work like a dog, Wasim.”
The third of the great Pakistani exponents of reverse swing – Waqar Younis – was yet another teenage prodigy to be fast-streamed into the international team. He was discovered on television. Imran Khan watched him in the Super Wills Cup (between the best domestic teams in Pakistan and India) in 1987-88 and was impressed enough to go to the ground the next day and pick him for Pakistan’s forthcoming series against India.
He made his Test debut one day before his 18th birthday – and dismissed another teenaged debutant, Sachin Tendulkar. High pace earned him four wickets and he soon consolidated a place in the side.
The historian of reverse swing encounters two major problems. First, its three great exponents were masters of every weapon in fast bowling. They could “work over” batsmen with sheer speed, they could bowl bouncers and yorkers at will, and above all, they could make the ball swing fast and late by conventional means. Most of the great innovations in cricket are evident to the observer – such as overarm bowling, Ranji’s leg glance, Bosanquet’s googly – although the method used to produce them may be a mystery. Reverse swing does not announce itself so obviously. Without the aid of close-up analysis it might be conventional swing bowled exceptionally well.
Second, its three great exponents said relatively little about it. Most of cricket’s bowling innovators were not shy about their discoveries. Bosanquet was happy for Australians to call his delivery a “bosie” before the more exotic name of “googly” became established. In the modern era, Saqlain Mushtaq exploited the mystique of his “doosra” and even claimed a further invention, the “teesra”, matched by Shane Warne’s announcement of the ‘“zooter”.
Imran, Wasim and Waqar let their wickets speak for themselves. They rarely, if ever, attributed their victims to reverse swing.
Of the three, Wasim Akram has written the most about it. However, in his autobiography his proudest reverse swing performance is not from a Test match but in the ‘Roses’ match for Lancashire against Yorkshire in his first English county championship season, in 1989.
His thoughts could serve as a template for the reaction of all Englishmen to being overtaken by a foreign innovator – and not just in sport.
“[This was] the first time that the English public saw what reverse swing was about ... I understand that Fred Trueman was amazed at the amount of late swing I was getting.
"It was no great secret as far as I was concerned. In the nets I’d worked hard at perfecting late swing from around the wicket, making my body turn more into a sideways position so that I could get the ball to move in the air. I’d told my Lancashire team-mates about the ideal conditions to get the ball to reverse: dry, hot, with the ball roughed up one side after about 40 overs’ use – and yet I was the only one using that technique at the time in English cricket ... I was surprised that my colleagues didn’t try to experiment with reverse swing when it was obviously working for me, but during that period they kept talking about line and length, about bowling in the ‘corridor of uncertainty’ on or about off stump.
"That was all very well against average players on wickets that helped the bowler, but when you come up against batsmen on flat wickets they’ll just whip such deliveries through mid wicket all day. Six of my 10 victims were clean bowled in that match and it was simply a case of utilising ideal weather for reverse swing. A few more years were to pass before English bowlers began to see the value of this technique.”
It is fair to say that the cricket world did not really take notice of reverse swing until its victims started to complain about it.
‘Wounded Tiger’ by Peter Oborne (Simon and Schuster, rrp £25) is available at £20 + £1.95 p&p from Telegraph Books on 0844 871 1515 or at books.telegraph.co.uk
