How the Aussies poached England's wobbly weapon

It's nearly 7pm on the penultimate day of the 2019 Manchester Test and Pat Cummins is about to make a mistake. At least, that's what he once would have labelled the delivery he is about to bowl to Joe Root.

Cummins has a fresh crimson-red ball in hand. It's the final innings of the match, his opponents require many more runs, and he has just dismissed Rory Burns. Australia have one hand on the Ashes urn but Ben Stokes' Headingley miracle was only a fortnight ago.

Cummins, though, is clear on what he's about to do.

Back when he was remodelling his bowling action during his injury-ravaged late teens and early-twenties, Cummins wanted to perfect an outswinger. His action lent itself to inswing, but his work in the nets centred on becoming a classical fast bowler who could move the ball in the air towards the right-hander's slip cordon.

"I'd get one of those red-and-white cricket balls where you can see the seam position, and it was always about trying to get the perfect seam," Cummins tells cricket.com.au.

If he got the training drill right, the red and white sides of the ball would drift serenely down the pitch after the release from his hand. If he got it wrong, the seam would wobble and the ball would be a mess, a red-and-white pavlova tumbling hopelessly through the air.

A mistake. Pick the ball up, go back to your mark, try again.

This was Pace Bowling 101. Like every other young fast bowler in Australia who showed some talent, Cummins had been taught to bowl with the seam back-spinning on its axis.

But, as Cummins begins his canter towards Root across the floodlit Old Trafford outfield, he is planning to do nothing of the sort. He has, quite remarkably for one of the game's greatest bowlers, never been much good at standing the seam bolt upright anyway.

So Cummins arrives at the crease and sends the ball hurtling towards Root with the seam spasming and shifting like a viper. It kisses the turf and what happens next appears to be sorcery but is in fact basic physics; 0.6 per cent of deviation from its original path is enough to elude Root's quite reasonable attempt at a defensive shot, whizz past the outside edge of his bat and hit the olive-green sponsor's logo painted onto the top of the off-stump.

All made possible by that wobbling seam.

***

Cummins is far from the only Australian who these days predominantly and deliberately bowls with a scrambled seam.

All the pace bowlers in their World Test Championship final and Ashes squads, and others on the periphery, now have the wobble-seam ball as a key part of their armoury.

It is an underappreciated aspect of the effectiveness of the 'big three' pacemen who have underpinned Australia's Test attack in recent years.

Yet, despite Australia being the probable location for the first routine use of the delivery in a Test series, the men in Baggy Green were puzzlingly late to employ it themselves.

While Allan Donald is said to have discussed the ball with Curtly Ambrose during the 1990s, Glenn McGrath, Australia's standout pace great of that era, confessed he had "never really heard of the wobble seam before" in an interview with the UK Telegraph in 2015.

Surprisingly, his New South Wales and Test teammate Stuart Clark had been nominated as having used the delivery during the 2006-07 Ashes by the two men who would popularise the wobble seam and eventually have a major influence on how their international pace rivals operated.

Stuart Broad and James Anderson's spearheading of England's only men's Ashes series triumph abroad in 23 years came on the back of extensive counsel from their Melbourne-born bowling coach David Saker, who stressed the need to develop additional options to shift a Kookaburra ball, which does not swing as much as the Dukes.

Image Id: 62B6181301DC4B4183E23BAA332EA3A7 Image Caption: Broad (left), Saker (centre) and Anderson (right) masterminded modern use of the wobble seam // Getty

Having also watched Pakistani seam-bowling wizard Mohammad Asif have success with the wobble seam in the UK in 2010, Broad and Anderson then extensively practiced bowling their own version in the nets leading into the 2010-11 Ashes.

In the years since, the two bowlers have come to employ the delivery slightly differently. Most bowlers around the world now who use the wobble seam could be characterised as more of an ‘Anderson’ or more of a ‘Broad’.

Anderson has retained his great skill of swinging the ball with an upright (or slightly angled, but still rotating on its axis) seam position. His scrambled-seam ball therefore becomes a change-up. For example, he may set up a right-handed batter with a succession of away-swingers before targeting the stumps with a wobble-seam delivery that is delivered with the same action but which will not swing and may even seam back towards the stumps. New Zealand’s Tim Southee is another who has tended to bowl with this strategy.

Broad applies almost the opposite approach. The wobble seam has become his stock delivery and he now even identifies as a "wobble-seam bowler". He can still, on occasion, bowl a conventional swinging ball and has spoken about developing an outswinger to counter Marnus Labuschagne and Steve Smith during this northern summer, but some days he may not look to swing the ball at all if he is generating sufficient movement off the pitch. Australia’s Josh Hazlewood likens himself to Broad in this respect.

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Broad’s method has been a barnstorming success against Australia. No bowler has taken more Test wickets against them over the past 15 years. Yet his method was slow to seep into the mainstream in this country.

It is telling that one of the main early Australian adopters of the wobble seam was Peter Siddle, whose understanding of its potency developed extensively by playing with Broad for Nottinghamshire, but whose international career was hindered by selectors' preference for the raw pace of his rivals.

Ironically, it might have been Pat Howard's introduction of the Dukes ball into the Sheffield Shield following the Test side's exposure on lively 2015 Ashes pitches that was the wobble-seam ball's silver bullet in Australia. 

Trent Copeland identifies a match during the Dukes experiment's first season in 2016-17 at the WACA Ground when he and his fellow NSW pace bowlers struggled to control the vicious deviation in the air offered by the British-made ball when exposed to the Indian Ocean winds.

According to Copeland, Blues captain Moises Henriques suggested their bowlers instead try a delivery he had seen used by local bowlers during a stint with Glamorgan.

Image Id: 2C782359972E4E95BE018581FD0EF7A2 Image Caption: 'I basically just tried it straightaway – and it started working' // Getty

"He was showing me a sort of 45-degree-angle seam," Copeland told the Unplayable Podcast.

"I basically just tried it straightaway – and it started working. Balls nipping back, taking the stumps or lbws.

"I had deliveries that came back in, but it was never as programmed as 45 degrees seam every time, bowl it like an outswinger pulling down with that middle finger and just bowling with your outswing action (before learning the wobble seam)."

Remarkably for one of the country's most skilful pacemen, Copeland to that point had relied on an outswinger to take the outside edge of right-handers, an inswinger to threaten their stumps and the odd bouncer to mix up their footwork.

It was a fallback blueprint for every seam bowler in Australia; tempt the batter with good-length balls outside off-stump, then pick the right moment to attack their stumps.

They were starting to discover there was a more effective, more deceptive and, in most cases, easier to execute, way to bowl.

"It just became part of the fabric," said Copeland of the wobble seam. "It became part of every really good quick bowler's armoury pretty quickly."

Marcus Harris, one of the left-handers who was terrorised by Broad's wobble-seam bowling during the 2019 Ashes, has noticed the marked shift from the other end.

"All the bowlers you face now in Shield cricket are more into the wicket with wobble seam than bolt upright trying to swing it," Harris told cricket.com.au, citing Western Australia's Joel Paris as perhaps the Sheffield Shield's only current "out and out swing bowler" (though even Paris now regularly employs the wobble seam).

"Bowlers have evolved over time and figured out that you don’t have to bowl with the seam bolt upright. The previous two or three summers at home we'd had the Dukes ball and all anyone was trying to do was swing it.

"It's probably harder if you're wobbling it around. You're not sure which way it's going to go, so how is the batter going to know which way it's going? When someone is really good at it, it's really difficult. You see all our (Test) bowlers now can do it."

***

No bowler in world cricket, with the possible exception of Broad, has profited more from discovering the wobble seam than Mitchell Starc.

"I joke still now with 'Cummo' (Cummins) and 'Hoff' (Hazlewood) that I probably should have asked the question 10 years ago," Starc told cricket.com.au.

The left-armer spent the majority of the 2019 Ashes watching his pace partners from the sidelines as Cummins and Hazlewood artfully led a plan to prioritise control over chasing wickets, seam over swing, heeding lessons from previous failed Australian missions in the UK.

While Starc now acknowledges it was a mistake to try to 'fit in' by sacrificing pace for accuracy, he did subsequently add the wobble seam to his arsenal.

Image Id: C0CFF00F6DE94B25A858398847482C49

"I can swing the ball and bowl fast, but when it stopped swinging, all I had was to bowl fast, and wait for it to go reverse," he said.

"So it was (about) adding a string to the bow and trying to develop that … (and) not just be someone who is a bit one-dimensional in only swinging the ball. It's been a nice addition."

Where Starc differs from his pace partners is his grip on the ball. Cummins, Hazlewood and now the newest member of the main Test bowling group, Scott Boland, all hold the ball with the seam subtly off the upright in order to produce the desired 'wobble' after its release.

Starc, on the other hand, points the seam past a 45-degree angle to execute the same ball.

Image Id: FDAAA2DCBD284399BDABB4583083EDF6 Image Caption: Starc's grips for his wobble seam ball (left) and his inswinger (right) // Fox Cricket

It has transformed his effectiveness as a bowler; he can still be a weapon with the new or a reverse-swinging ball, but is a far more potent weapon than he once was when there is no swing on offer.

Since the 2019 Ashes, he has maintained his elite strike-rate at around a wicket every 50 deliveries, while also conceding 25.76 runs per wicket, slightly lower than his career mark of 27.52. But he is doing all that while going at a significantly more frugal run-rate; in that time, he is conceding 3.09 runs per over, while up until the 2019 Ashes, he was going at 3.38. 

"He only played one Test (during the 2019 Ashes) but he worked so hard outside of the games on his craft and that included trying to come up with a wobble seam ball, trying to bring his length back and get some bounce across a right-hander," said Cummins.

"Ever since then you've seen him take lots of wickets – here in Australia in particular – with that ball angling across a right-hander, which is a bit different to how he went about it pre-2019."

In Cummins' case, the shift to the wobble seam came earlier.

He had of course tried to fight his natural tendencies when his younger and more injury-prone self strived for perfection. It was not until he started regularly playing Test cricket in 2017 that he realised he did not need to view his natural inswinger's action, nor the middle finger on his right hand being the same length as his index finger due to a childhood accident, as obstacles.

Image Id: 6D97A343B1194E03B35BE58608101D28

"I always felt like 'you've got to try and bowl with perfect swing, you've got to try to bowl the perfect outswinger'," said Cummins.

"For me at times that can be harder – whether it's my action, whether it's my finger – but the day where I switched to wanting to get bounce and get reactions off the pitch, as opposed to swinging the ball in the air, that was a game-changer for me.

"It was probably only once I started playing Test cricket in 2017, 2018 that I realised, 'You know what, some days I've got good seam position and some days I don't, and it doesn't really matter'.

"The end goal is to put it in as good an area as possible and if I can get some sideways movement from that, that's the main goal."

That point had been hammered home to Boland well before his astonishing Test entrance.

During his formative years at Victoria, he closely observed how fellow quicks Siddle and John Hastings found movement despite scrambling the seam. Boland also took a close interest in how Broad deceived Test batters with the wobble seam, with Dan Christian (who played with the England paceman at Nottinghamshire) often sending him pictures of Broad's seam position.

The Boland-Christian-Broad trio even played golf together in 2018 when the two Australians were in the United Kingdom for a commemorative Indigenous tour, though the naturally reserved Boland refrained from an extensive interrogation of Broad's methods.

Saker also had a telling influence on Boland during his one year at the helm of his state team.

"One thing 'Sakes' always said when he was coaching Victoria was that it doesn't matter what the ball does, it matters where it does it from," said Boland.

"So if you get the ball in the right area the movement helps, but if it's not in that area it doesn't matter."

Image Id: AA15AC33956546DE8E8001D7D6962CA8

The Australian quicks joke about how Hazlewood, who also credits Saker for developing his wobble-seam ball when he was fast-bowling coach for Australia, may be the most skilful of all of them with wobble-seam movement.

"He's able to do it at will and almost knows which way it's going to nip – he'll tell you he does anyway," Starc said with a smile.

Hazlewood laughs when that's put to him.

"They're taking the piss," he said. "If I don't know, then they (the batters) don't know."

England may not truly be able to lay claim to inventing the wobble seam, but few would argue they have not been the pioneers of a method that has had a transformative effect on fast bowling.

So are the Aussies comfortable with stealing their rivals' intellectual property?

"If it means we win the Ashes, absolutely," said Starc. "Why not?"

2023 Qantas Tour of the UK

World Test Championship Final: Wednesday June 7-Sunday June 11, The Oval

First Test: Friday June 16-Tuesday June 20, Edgbaston

Second Test: Wednesday June 28-Sunday July 2, Lord’s

Third Test: Thursday July 6-Monday July 10, Headingley

Fourth Test: Wednesday July 19-Sunday July 23, Old Trafford

Fifth Test: Thursday July 27-Monday 31, The Oval

Australia squad: Pat Cummins (c), Scott Boland, Alex Carey (wk), Cameron Green, Marcus Harris, Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Josh Inglis (wk), Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Mitch Marsh, Todd Murphy, Matthew Renshaw, Steve Smith (vc), Mitchell Starc, David Warner