The Weapon of Mass Destruction

By Rajadhyax

Probably no other ball in cricket causes as much fear and anxiety as the bouncer bowled by a genuinely quick bowler or a very deceptive medium pacer. Firstly, due to human instinct of self-preservation, there is the fear that the ball could strike a body blow and cause injury. Secondly, there is anxiety as to how exactly to play the ball, since attack and defence can both be employed against such a ball. It’s a confusion that someone who has played against a good ‘quickie’ will truly understand!

For those still uninitiated in the virtues of the game, a ‘bouncer’ is a ball bowled by a pace man, which is pitched short (that means closer to the bowler than the batsman) and made to rise well above the chest level of the batsman. A good bouncer usually passes at a height between the chest and the top of the head. A helmet is considered quite handy if the opposing team has a bowler who can send some like that. Coming from a very quick bowler it can cause injury when batsmen miss the line of the ball or cannot sway away from it. Aggressive batsmen who are not scared of it may end up hooking it into the hands of the fine-leg or square-leg fielder. Defensive batsmen may fend it to the slips, short-leg or silly point.

It is not very easy to face a bouncer. Firstly, you need to gauge the exact pace and line of the ball and then also judge the height it will gather. If it’s too high – say, above your head – then the sensible thing to do is to let it go harmlessly to the wicket keeper. If its line is well away from you, then too you have the option to let it go. Things get uncomfortable when it comes right at you. If you hope to defend at it, then a right hander will have let his right hand go limp on the bat and keep the left hand in the line of his eye (or a little lower, depending on the ball’s height). If you want to attack, then hook shot is the only good option left to you. The hook is played in the air if you are confident of clearing the field and in that case your bat has to go under the ball. If you are not so confident then play it on the ground and that obviously means your bat has to come over the ball. Being on the back foot is mandatory. Middling the ball is absolutely necessary in case of the hook or else a catch off the top edge to square leg or mid wicket is a common phenomenon. (Yours truly even edged it once to the short mid-on fielder while hooking from outside the off stump).

Apart from a rare exception like Sunil Gavaskar, it is taller men who play the hook shot more comfortably.

Some of the greatest bowlers of the televised era to bowl a lethal bouncer would be Andy Roberts (WI), Malcolm Marshall (WI), Dennis Lillie (Aust), Kapil Dev (Ind), Bob Willis (Eng), Imran Khan (Pak), Michael Holding (WI), Jeff Thompson (Aust), Allan Donald (SA) and Joel Garner (WI). They all had their own subtle differences. For instance, Roberts invented the slow bouncer. Kapil was not too quick but his bouncer was the most deceptive; by the time you realised it’s a bouncer, it would be too late. Imran could bowl a bouncer that was not merely quick but it would come in off the seam. Marshall’s bouncers were not so much aimed at taking a wicket but more at taking your head off. In the current lot, Brett Lee, Shoaib Akhtar, Dale Styne, Malinga, Harmison and a couple of others have a decent bouncer. But, alas, no one these days to match the Windies trio. One could also argue that over the years wickets have become a tad slower and batsmen-friendly too.

The bouncer has traditionally been a weapon of mass destruction. But it has also been used as a tactical weapon. The oldest routine is to bowl bouncer that passes close to the batsman’s nose, unsettles him and to follow it up with a stinging Yorker. Another common tactic has been to make a lot of show of arranging deep mid wicket and deep square leg fielder until the batsman feels a bouncer is on the way and then to slip in a swinging out-swinger that needs to be played on the front foot. Many times these tactics work to get a wicket for you. But have no illusions, the bouncer is mainly a tool of intimidation. It is supposed to scare the wits out of the batsman (soften him up, as we say) and then get his wicket. With the introduction of helmets and chest guards in cricket, the fear element may have come down, but it has not disappeared altogether. Hence the bouncer is still a cause of those butterflies in the batsman’s belly.