Reverse swing's dark arts come to light

In the fledgling days of Australia's current cricket season, an international player was chipped by a similarly senior umpire over his repeated ditching of the ball from the outfield to the stumps via the heavily trafficked wicket block, on the bounce.

The reason for the official's displeasure was his clear belief that the fielder was blatantly attempting get the ball 'scuffed' so that the essential first stage of the mysterious reverse swing process could be – for want of a less obvious descriptor – swung into action.

The fielder's curt reply to the umpire's challenge highlighted the problem that those on-field arbiters charged with enforcing the laws of the game, as opposed to those sitting a comfortable distance away furiously defending its nebulous spirit, have in prosecuting a successful case.

"I've had problems with my shoulder and that's as far as I can throw it," the player fired back at the suggestion he was deliberately hurling the ball into the most abrasive sub-section of an otherwise lush outfield in order to take chunks from its shiny leather surface.

"If you want to pay for my surgery, I'll try to throw it further."

Whether that mitigation was invoked at Hagley Oval in Christchurch today when English umpire Richard Kettleborough appeared to take issue with the frequency and ferocity with which Australia's fielders were finding the pitch with their return throws is unclear.

What was obvious from television pictures was that Kettleborough voiced his concerns with Australia captain Steve Smith, and then Smith's rival skipper Brendon McCullum was moved to make a prima facie inspection of said ball when he retrieved it from his feet during his final Test innings.

As a batsman, handling the ball while it is still deemed 'live' is against the laws of cricket.

Not having sufficient arm strength or directional awareness to get it back to the wicketkeeper or whoever's guarding the bowler's end stumps is not.

"He was probably having a look to see what it looked like, basically," said Voges who was not a member of the Australia team that turned on Faf du Plessis when he performed a similar service at Cape Town in 2014 in the manner of – as the South African later described – "a pack of dogs".

"We've probably got it going more (swinging reverse) than what they (NZ) have.

"It can be to do with the conditions as well, the wicket is probably drying out and is a bit more abrasive so the ball is scuffing up a bit more, but I'm sure he was just having a look to see what was happening."

If McCullum was hoping to glean insights as to how heavily the ball needs to be scuffed and abraded on one side, and how much sheen, sweat and saliva needs to be lavished on the other in order to get it to swing reverse (ie with the shiny side rather than away from it) then he doesn't have long to impart them.

Unless Kane Williamson can repeat some of his epic innings of the not-so-distant-past, McCullum has perhaps a day, maybe slightly longer allowing for forecast rain interruptions tomorrow, before the second Test wraps up and he becomes a roving T20 franchise bat for hire.

And given the time he has already spent in that role with the Indian Premier League, mixing closely with the very best players of his generation from throughout the world, it is perhaps unexpected that he has not already pocketed that knowledge and passed it on to his bowlers.

NZ's highest-ranked Test bowler, left-arm swing specialist Trent Boult, expressed surprise in the wake of Australia's thumping first Test in Wellington last week that the visiting bowlers had found prolonged and productive reverse swing when the locals could not.

It was then foreshadowed that the art form, for long the domain of pace bowlers on the subcontinent where pitch and weather conditions don't allow for conventional swing that usually requires grassy pitches and often dark, damp atmospherics, wouldn't be a factor at Hagley.

Where the presence of a heavily-grassed outfield and an equally pristine wicket block, save for the pitch employed for the second Test of the Trans-Tasman Series, would provide few opportunities for those familiar with the reverse swing craft to sufficiently deface the ball.

On day one, that was certainly the case as movement off the seam courtesy of the grassed pitch was the pre-eminent factor in the Black Caps being bowled out in 65.4 overs.

And come the Australians' turn to bat on days one through to three, it was Neil Wagner's propensity to bang the ball onto the surface rather than Boult, Tim Southee and Matt Henry's rare ability to move it through the air that landed a lion's share of the wickets to fall.

But when the Australians suddenly started to get the ball swinging counter-intuitively after around 20 overs this afternoon, by which time Smith had employed a cordon of catchers in front of the wicket (a reverse swing strategy) but very few behind it, questions were being raised.

By commentators and umpires, if not the crowd lounging languidly on the grass banks.

"I don't know if we are doing anything differently," Voges said today when asked if he could pinpoint why, for the second match in succession, reverse swing was a weapon for Australia but a mystery to New Zealand.

"I think maybe with a tad more air speed that maybe exaggerates reverse swing a bit more and our guys seem to be able to go a little bit both ways which maybe exaggerates it a bit more.

"But we look after the ball, we again got one of the sides a little bit scuffed and looked after the other side and away we went.

"It's one thing to reverse it, it's another thing to have the skills to do it and I thought our guys did it really well today."

And perhaps that's where the real skill resides.

Hurling the ball on to the cut stuff is no guarantee a bowler will be able to get it to hoop late towards a batsman's foot - like a heel-seeking missile – from the very next delivery.

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As Smith revealed after the tactic was employed successfully in Wellington last week, the crucial blow was struck by an (unnamed) Black Caps batsman when he square cut the ball hard into the adjacent pitch surface and scraped a large chunk from one side.

There have been other instances when batters have belted the ball over the fence only to have it strike a concrete wall or a cement path, and see it return (from the batting team's perspective) with a self-inflicted wound.

Hitting the ball beyond the pickets is not against the laws, but it can have the same effect as chucking it into the hardest on-field surface which the Australians were seen doing on several occasions yesterday.

Most notably when 'keeper Peter Nevill back pedalled a few steps to allow a throw to get to him on the bounce rather than on the full.

But maybe he was simply more comfortable in accepting the return at that resultant height?

New Zealand's 'keeper B J Watling claimed having the ball tossed in from the deep on the bounce rather than the full is part of the game, and is difficult to adjudicate as a deliberate ploy – unless there's repeated instances of players who can't make the distance from short boundaries.

"We do talk about that," Watling said tonight, when quizzed on the practice.

"You try and get it to go (reverse swing) if you're not getting much (conventional) swing.

"They (Australia) were successful at it and we didn't quite get it to go."

So all teams embrace and recognise it as a tactic, the practice itself comes with no indelible guarantee it will elicit the result that's sought and it therefore falls to the umpire to make a call on whether it is deemed a 'sharp practice' or simply part of the game's intrinsic vagaries.

With the only bargaining chip available to them being the threat to confiscate the ball and replace it with a new one if it's deemed to be deliberately altering its state.

At which time the process would only begin anew on the substitute version, as players from around the world will happily attest.

"There's a line," Voges acknowledged when asked tonight about the rights and wrongs of a practice that falls within cricket's laws but can push the boundary of its 'spirit'.

"I'm sure most fielding teams will get as close to the line as they can without overstepping it - that's the umpires' job to tell us when we're getting close.

"That's what happened today and we kept it up pretty well after that."