MIRROR 2
- strie4
- 17 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Mirror, mirror on the wall
Who’s the fastest of them all?
Speed intrigues and enthrals. Even those of us who do not seek the thrill of extreme velocity ourselves – on a motor bike, in a car, down a ski slope – we are, let’s face it, fascinated by speed, how fast a human can go, or an animal, or a machine. That’s why world records are sought and the winners lauded. The fastest man and woman on the planet? Who doesn’t tune into the men’s and the women’s 100 metres final at the Olympics to find out just that. The current world record holders in this event, and by definition the fastest human beings ever recorded, are:
Men: Usain Bolt, who attained a speed of 27mph during his 100 metres world record of 9.58 seconds in final of the 2009 World Athletics Championships in Berlin.
Women: Florence Griffith-Joyner, who reached a speed of 24mph during her 100 metres world record of 10.49 seconds set at the US Olympics Trials in 1988.
The fastest bird? Peregrine falcons in a stoop reach a speed of 190mph.
The fastest animal? Cheetahs reach a speed of 64mph (though I reckon my whippet, Dilly, would have given them a run for their money).
The world record speed on water? 317mph
The world record speed on land? A scarcely credible 763mph, faster than the speed of sound.
The fastest airplane? 7,336mph, or Mach 9.6 according to the techies.
The fastest tennis serve? John Isner of the US served an ace measured at 157mph in a Davis Cup match in 2016.
From tennis I move seamlessly to cricket. As anybody who has ever played the game will know, cricket is a hard game played by hard men with a hard ball. At the root of every match is a primal confrontation. It may be a team game, but every ball is a contest between batsman and bowler, between hunter and hunted. When a fast bowler is involved, the battle becomes even more primordial. The risk of injury, serious injury, even death, is very real. All the best and most-up-to-date protective equipment could not prevent poor Philip Hughes dying at the crease in a match in Australia in 2014 after being struck on the head by a bouncer. The history of the game is littered with examples of batsmen suffering severe injury after being hit with the ball delivered by a fast bowler. It takes guts not to run scared from fast bowling. “Anybody who says he enjoys fast bowling is lying.” So said the Indian batsman, GR Vishwanath. A former West Indian opening batsman, Roy Marshall, who played for Hampshire for many years, and who was renowned for his fearless assaults on opposing opening bowlers, once admitted to me – to my utter astonishment – that he was always worried about getting hit. “But the trick,” he said, “is not to let them see it.”
A question I am repeatedly asked when anybody discovers that I was a professional cricketer is: “Who was the fastest bowler you ever faced?” Never the slowest or the most nagging medium-pacer or the best swinger of a ball or the sharpest spinner. Always, always there is this visceral fascination with pace, sheer, raw, elemental speed. It stirs the blood. A bit like bull fighting. Or, in another age, gladiatorial combat. As to the answer of who was the quickest I have ever faced, I would give it a three-way tie: Jeff Thomson, Michael Holding and Andy Roberts. Roberts! How come, seeing as he was on the same side as me at Hampshire? Well, he used to practise his bouncers to us in the nets. That is until we persuaded him to conserve his energy for matches and to bowl to us instead the most innocuous off-breaks you have ever seen.
It has been calculated that a batsman has 0.44 of a second to react to a ball delivered at 90mph. Which in effect means that he has no time at all; he just guesses and hopes for the best. In truth, I had no idea whether any one of Thommo or Holding or Roberts was quicker than the others. I was too busy in survival mode to concern myself with fractional distinctions. Actually, none of them got me out. All I did was sit on the back foot, turn myself sideways to minimise the size of target and to play with a straight bat the (few) balls that were not short and to bail out when it was a bouncer. I survived – God.
knows how – but for the life of me I couldn’t work out how on earth I was going to score a run (which I didn’t). Frankly, it was terrifying.
The Middle Ages were described by the 17th century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, as being “nasty, brutish and short”. The picture might just as easily have been used as a snapshot of cricket in the 1970s and 1980s. Never before in the long history of the game has there been such a conglomeration of seriously fast bowlers. Just look at the dramatis personae: Willis, Snow, Lillee, Thomson, Roberts, Holding, Garner, Hughes, Marshall, Imran, McDermott, Walsh, Ambrose, Wasim, Waqar, Daniel, Clarke, le Roux, Patterson, Bishop, Donald, Croft….the list seems endless. No wonder helmets were developed halfway through this era, during the Packer Revolution. Barry Richards told me that during the ‘Test’ matches of World Series Cricket, the number of half-volleys he received could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Truly was it nasty and brutish with a surfeit of the short stuff.
Of course, fast bowlers have always been among us, ever since we eschewed underarm and started to bowl overarm. But they tended to operate as single spies; only when they paired up to make a potent weapon from both ends did batsmen truly shake in their boots. But how fast were they? We have no means of truly knowing. We only have opinions from contemporaries and onlookers from the boundary edge.
Fred Spofforth was probably the first to gain international notoriety. An Australian, he was the first bowler to take 50 Test match wickets and the first to take a Test match hat-trick in 1879. His fame was secured in a match between the MCC and the Australians at Lord’s in 1878. The Englishmen were humbled, bowled out for 39 and 19, Spofforth taking 10-20 in the match. “Ain’t I a demon, ain’t I a demon?” he theatrically demanded of his team-mates back in the dressing room. The soubriquet stuck. Thereafter he was known as The Demon.
Charles Kortright played primarily for Essex from 1889 – 1903 but never represented his country. For all that he gave many an opposing batsman, including the 50-year-old WG Grace, a thorough-going battering. He once bowled a bouncer that sailed over the wicket-keeper’s head and was still rising as it cleared the boundary, the only instance of six byes being recorded, though strictly speaking, according to the laws, it should only have counted as four byes. In his obituary in the 1953 edition of Wisden, he was described as the fastest bowler in the history of the game.
I wonder what Tom Richardson would have made of that. He did play for his country, England, in 14 Tests between 1893 and 1898 and was heralded for his long run-up, his high arm and his ability to bowl a wicket-taking ‘break-back’ ball without ever sacrificing his high pace, often in long and gruelling spells, particularly in the heat and on the hard wickets of Australia.
Gregory and McDonald were the first example of a pair of fast bowlers operating in tandem, to great effect. Together they played in only 11 Tests for Australia over a period of just ten months in 1921, eight against England and three against South Africa. Yet in this brief period of time, their fame was cemented. Jack Gregory, as described by a writer at the time, possessed “a fiercely bouncing run to the wicket flat out, with a quite frightening leap in the delivery stride.” He was fast alright. Ted McDonald did not possess his partner’s explosive pace but had a beguiling grace to his action, relying more on seam and swing to get his wickets. Not for nothing did the papers dub them as Fire and Brimstone.
Then we come to the most famous – or infamous, if you’re Australian – pair of destructive bowlers, Larwood and Voce. Their notoriety stems from the controversial Bodyline Series of 1932-33 in Australia. Voce was a fine left-arm quickie in his own right, but it was Larwood who struck fear into the Australian batsmen, including Bradman, with his deceptively quiet, lithe approach to the wicket and his long levers propelling the ball at terrifying pace, an action built on strong back and backside muscles developed down the pit in the Nottinghamshire coal mines. Was he the fastest ever? Bradman certainly thought so, of all the bowlers that he had faced and observed (that is until he watched, flinching all the while – from the safety of the pavilion - another Englishman putting the fear of God into Australian batsmen on the tour of that country in 1954-55)Bodyline in action. The Australian captain, Bill Woodfall, takes evasive action from another thunderbolt from Larwood. Note the packed legside field. Jardine, the England captain, hated the term ‘bodyline’. He preferred to call his tactic ‘leg-side theory’.
Typhoon Tyson he was dubbed. It was the considered opinion of all those who played in that series, as well as experienced and knowledgeable onlookers, that nobody has ever bowled as fast as Frank Tyson in the Sydney Test in December 1954. Tom Graveney, who fielded at slip, told me when I was writing his biography, “We were standing a good 40 yards back. We were closer to the gate for the heavy roller than we were to the stumps. Thank God Frank bowled them or got them LBW! None of us fancied catching any nicks.” Tyson took 6-85 to secure an England victory by just 38 runs. He was once clocked by a speedometer at 90mph but as he later claimed, “That was from a stationary position. And I had three sweaters on!” Besides, speed guns were very much in their infancy back then and pretty unreliable. So how fast was he? In his second career as a cricket columnist and writer (he was, to be fair, an English graduate from Durham University) he tended to pour scorn on the inflated claims of speeds approaching 100mph by modern fast bowlers. “There might have been faster bowlers before them,” he pointedly observed. He was adamant that there were times on that tour when he bowled in excess of 100mph, especially at Sydney with a strong wind at his back. Certainly, Bradman believed that Tyson was the fastest he had ever seen, and he had faced Larwood. To put the Typhoon into context, it was generally accepted that for sheer speed he knocked the other quickies of the era, Miller, Lindwall, Trueman, Statham, Adcock, Heine, into a cocked hat.
We now move on to the era of the nasty, brutish and short. Where in the serried ranks of the great fast bowlers of the Seventies and Eighties do we find the fastest of them all? By general consent, I think we can narrow it down to one of two, Jeff Thomson and Michael Holding. Thomson bowled at his peak in the years 1974-76 at 99.8mph, when he terrorised England and West Indian batsmen in successive series. Holding in that series of Australia v West Indies of 1975-76 was clocked at 97mph. Commentators thus claim that Thommo is probably the fastest bowler in cricket history, though those who witnessed Tyson in 1954-55 might disagree.
And what of the fast men of more recent vintage? Shaun Tait of Australia bowled one ball at Lord’s in 2010 at 100.1mph and Shoib Akhtar of Pakistan bowled a ball clocked at 100.2 mph in 2003 (but it must be added that he was roundly suspected of throwing his fastest balls). But these were single deliveries, a flash in the pan, so to speak. Neither was able, nor indeed tried, to maintain that speed throughout a sustained spell. Thommo could do that and did, so did Holding, Tyson and Larwood.
In the end, the argument, though engaging, is superfluous. What is important in a game of cricket is the taking of a wicket, not how fast or how slow the ball has been delivered. Pace, extreme pace, can have the effect of demoralising a batting side, puncturing their stomach for the fight, but still the stumps have to be hit, and the edges caught. You don’t win matches by knocking batsmen’s heads off. But cricket is a game of emotion as well as statistics. You can sense this in the immediate change of atmosphere in a crowd when, say, Jofra Archer measures out his run. Fast bowling arouses the senses and for the batsman, scrambles the mind. We are thrilled, absorbed, intoxicated by the contest between the hunted and the hunter, for though it is just a game, there is the real threat that somebody might get hurt. I can only liken it to a jousting match between two armoured knights on horseback. Nobody means to injure his opponent – all he needs to do is unseat him – but it remained a dangerous, high-impact contest of skill, accuracy and nerve. The mediaeval equivalent of a fast bowler tilting at a batsman. Who on earth bemoaned the fact that cricket was slow?
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