IPL bowling menu: varieties of slower balls

Bengaluru: The next time you're on the inner ring road stretch between Domlur and Koramangala early in the day, pay attention. You will most likely spot an atypically tall man in a grey hoodie running against the traffic. 

Lost to the sounds in his EarPods, Venkatesh Prasad's body glides over the tarmac with his eyes on the horizon. He still looks every bit the athlete he always was. 

Even as images of his send-off to Aamer Sohail during the 1996 World Cup quarterfinal come screaming back to juxtapose with his current avatar as an amateur runner, it is that legendary leg-cutter you are reminded of most. 

While those long fingers roll over the ball to the left, there is no discernible change in action or an introduced deviation to natural arm speed. Up until the ball leaves his fingers, it is all the same, but what happens after is anything but... 

The ball floats a tad before abruptly becoming a victim of gravity. Upon landing, it grips the surface and goes away from a right-hander about as much as Anil Kumble used to turn the ball. That micro-delay in the air is enough to throw a batter's timing off. That micro-deviation off the surface is enough to put the ball out of reach of an eager bat. 

Prasad used this delivery across the two formats in close to two hundred international games for nearly three hundred wickets. And yet, the leg-cutter - what with its fabled history - is a thing of the past.

"The leg-cutter in modern-day cricket is a bit lost," Lakshmipathy Balaji tells DH. "It's actually a skillset you develop in red-ball cricket. If you play enough red-ball cricket like we used to you will end up using the leg-cutter. When the surface is slow, the ball grips and deviates off the wicket, but for that, the ball needs to be a certain shape and of a certain abrasion level. Normally, when the lacquer goes off and the real leather comes through, that is when you start using the leg-cutter more effectively. Basically, the glossiness needs to come off before you can start bowling the leg-cutter.

"In T20 cricket, the ball hardly gets rough so I would assume that's one of the reasons why the leg-cutter is not used as extensively."

Also, the leg-cutter does take a toll on your shoulder given the angle at which the ball is released. 

"It's like bowling leg-spin, you don't see leg-spinners being called for questionable actions, do you? Your elbow can't flex at all while bowling leg-spin so your shoulder does the work, but in the case of leg-spin, your wrist assists you, but while bowling a leg-cutter you don't have that assistance. You rotate your shoulder internally and it's uncomfortable over a period of time," explains biomechanics expert Ramji Srinivasan. 

In conjunction, India bowling coach Paras Mhambrey reckons the reason for the decline is: "The problem with something like a leg-cutter is that you can bring on bad habits. People who try the delivery typically tend to lose shape (to their bowling action) so you need a lot of experience before you start bowling it."

Some of the world's greatest pacers, including the likes of Jeff Thomson and Brett Lee, were practitioners of the leg-cutter, but even they relied on the off-cutter more and more in the later stages of their careers because it offered more control. "The off-cutter is a significantly easier delivery to bowl and control, you just need to break at the wrist, and you can bowl the off-cutter no matter what condition the ball is in," says Balaji. 

But the off-cutter is just one, and also the most obvious, of the many deceptions bowlers have had to come up with to remain in charge of the situation. 

With time - and this is true for anyone, let alone someone at the highest level - speed becomes irrelevant. Hardcore pace is no doubt difficult to face, but it's something you can work towards getting comfortable with. 

But the slower ball is not so easy when concealed well because your body (by now used to facing balls coming at a certain speed) betrays your eyes, and by the time you get those two characters in alignment, you're typically in a compromising position.

Lee used to hold the ball deep in his palm so when he goes to release the ball, it takes just a bit longer to leave his hand.

Sri Lanka's Dilhara Fernando had a split-finger variation where his index and middle fingers would part to either side of the centred seam and the ball would float with an upright seam. 

Pakistan's Abdul Razzaq had a wicked back-of-the-hand slower ball by the time he ended his career. 

Indian legend Zaheer Khan picked up a wild knuckle ball from baseball and introduced it to an amazed audience at the 2011 World Cup. 

These deliveries have been around long enough to become mainstream, but they weren't as frequently used as they are being used these days.

Take this edition of the Indian Premier League for instance. Not a single pacer, not even the likes of Lucknow Super Giants' Mayank Yadav, have steered away from using all of their slower-ball variations.  

Granted, not all of them are particularly well disguised, but the bowlers who do have tact get away with it because batters, besides adjusting to the new pace, have to generate the power to hit the ball since the bowler itself is barely offering any momentum to use.

Within the slower ball itself, the lines and the lengths matter too. A dipping slower-ball yorker, as hard as that is to execute, is a death knell to most, and the slower-ball bouncer is brilliant at cutting the flow of runs. The bouncer does occasionally fetch you a wicket, but it's typically bowled to tighten things up and ensure that those annoying top edges don't carry to the third man or fine leg fence. 

"I don't think you need so many variations but you have to be proficient with at least one because, say you bowl the off-cutter, if you change up the length and the line you already have several variations there," says Balaji.

"What's important, perhaps more than the variation itself, is the time you choose to bowl the ball. It's mostly intuitive, but most bowlers have an idea of ground dimensions, a batter's tendencies, field placements... once you have experience, you can almost always bowl the right ball for the right situation. You might still get hit, but that's not because the delivery you chose was the wrong one, it's because sometimes, batters are better, even if only for one ball."

And that's just the thing, you could have the most deceptive array of slower balls in your arsenal and you can still get whacked about. That's the reality of being a bowler in a world designed for batters and Jasprit Bumrah.