The innovation that never was: Ten years on from the banning of the double-bouncer

NICK FRIEND: Graeme Welch believed he had developed a masterplan - a ball of bouncer length that dipped almost towards a second bounce as it reached the batsman. And then, just like that, it was banned before it could even be introduced to the world

In June 2010, Warwickshire thought they were onto something. The Indian Premier League was three years old; Kevin Pietersen’s switch-hit was old news; England had returned from the Caribbean as World T20 champions, a tournament won on a formula of slower balls.

Innovation was as rife as it was necessary, with the Twenty20 stratosphere evolving and expanding.

Graeme Welch, bowling coach at Edgbaston, approached his charges with a theory: a double-bouncing yorker – in simple terms, another way of stopping the ball from flying into the stands.

The logic was straightforward, the physics sound.

“The plan was to bowl it out the back of the hand and into the pitch – the idea was not necessarily for it to bounce twice, but for it to be on the way down when it reached the batsman,” Welch explains.

“If you miss a yorker by an inch normally, the ball’s travelling up so you can always get under the ball. Speaking to Rikki Clarke and Chris Woakes, they reckoned that if the ball was on the way down, it might be more difficult to hit.”

Batsmen would see the length and naturally push themselves back, only to then see the ball dropping at their feet. At that point, there would be few aggressive options available. Ingenious, so Welch thought.

It all made perfect sense. Deception is at the heart of white-ball bowling in this modern age of 360-degree hitting, big bats and inviting boundaries. And this was extending that concept to its extremes – a delivery that was both simultaneously bouncer and yorker.

As Welch points out: “You either need to bowl 90mph, be a mystery spinner or you need to have all the variations.” Here he was, looking to add a game-changing club to the bag.

Clarke, now of Surrey but then of Warwickshire and still one of the county game’s best proponents of the back-of-the-hand variation, had the best handle on it.

“From what I remember, I was bowling it out the back of the hand and I was literally pitching it by my feet – about two yards in front of you,” he says. “It would have this massive top-spin, kick on, bounce above the batter’s eyeline a little bit and then have a dip on its way down.

“We worked on making sure that when the ball was dipping on the way down, it was going towards the yorker line and dipping on the batter to try to deceive them that way and get right underneath them.

“It was a bit of a lightbulb moment. You could create a delivery that bounced and was then on its way down as it reached the batter, which made it harder to get under and hit because there was no pace on it, so they’d be more likely to toe it. From there, we were like: ‘Let’s work on this as a delivery.’

“We worked on it and we were actually getting quite a lot of success. We were all ready to use it in a game and see how it went. But then we got a thing through saying it had been banned.”

^{Warwickshire bowling coach Graeme Welch first had the idea}

And just like that, there went Welch’s masterplan. The thought had first entered his mind during his playing days at Derbyshire, when he witnessed teammate Nathan Dumelow dismiss Darren Stevens in a Totesport League match against Leicestershire in 2004. On that occasion, the ball had simply come out wrong – it was no more than a happy accident, but it planted a seed. There was nothing in the rules that prevented it and it made life awkward for batsmen.

Yet, the fun was quashed before it had even begun. The ECB had got wind of Welch’s brainchild – via a conversation between a bowler and an umpire, he thinks. Ahead of a televised T20 clash with Derbyshire and following a meeting of the governing body’s cricket committee, a directive was issued to every county, stating that the delivery would be called a no-ball even though it did not then contravene the laws of the game.

It stated: “Further to an ECB Cricket Committee recommendation, it is confirmed that the practice of bowling a ball that bounces twice should be disallowed with immediate effect. It is considered inappropriate for the image and spirit of our game.”

It was a stance disputed by the MCC. “We don’t think it is against the Spirit of Cricket or contrary to the laws of the game,” responded Keith Bradshaw, the organisation’s chief executive at the time.

Then, the law ruled that only deliveries that bounced more than twice would be penalised. Elsewhere in the world, beyond the Friends Provident t20, the delivery could still for a time have been used.

In 2017, however, this was altered. It now reads that “the umpire shall call and signal no-ball if a ball which he/she considers to have been delivered, without having previously touched bat or person of the striker...bounces more than once or rolls along the ground before it reaches the popping crease”.

A decade on, a whiff of intrigue remains. “That’s the disappointing thing,” Clarke ponders. “You don’t know how it would have gone. People are trying different deliveries all the time. You have to come up with different ways of stopping batters.

“There was nothing in the rules to say you couldn’t. Yet, it got around pretty quickly that this is what we were working on. And then it got taken away. I think that’s the disappointing side of it because we actually looked to see if it was outlawed and it wasn’t. We’d thought outside the box a little bit to come up with something that might help the bowlers and the bowling unit.”

At the time, the Daily Telegraph reported that the ECB feared a repeat of the kind of controversy that followed Trevor Chappell’s infamous underarm delivery to New Zealand’s Brian McKechnie in 1981. It led to the banning of underarm bowling by the ICC.

The opposite argument in this scenario was that the two cases were wildly different, especially given the level of skill involved in perfecting what Welch and his bowlers had dreamt up. A fraction too short and the ball would bounce too many times, becoming an illegal delivery. Too full and it wouldn’t dip sufficiently, instead sitting up at knee height to be hoisted away over the boundary. Understanding the pace of the pitch was another factor to be considered.

^{Nathan Dumelow dismissed Darren Stevens with a ball that bounced twice in 2004}

There is no debate that purely on a viewing level, it would have taken some getting used to. “Everyone would have gone: ‘Oh, what’s he done there? He’s got that horribly wrong,’” Clarke laughs. “But it would have been on purpose and if the batter doesn’t hit it out of the park, it’s a success.”

And if it went wrong? “You’d look an absolute fool,” Welch adds. “But you’d have said the same thing with the slower ball bouncer – that used to be a pie when I bowled ten years before.

“With this, you’ve got to get it right out of the back of your hand, and then you’ve got to pitch it as short as you can, which goes against every single thing you try to do as a bowler – your psyche and everything.

“You have to understand the pace of the pitch. If you do it well, automatically the batsman sees it short and so he changes his shape. And then, before he can react, the ball is on the way down.”

Looking back on a curious episode a decade on, Clarke cannot quite recall how advanced he was in his training before the plan was written off. He has been tempted at times over the years to revisit it. Yet, Welch remembers his bowlers practising the tactic against batsmen and seeing them visibly surprised by the unusual variation.

“The first thing I saw was he started to duck a little bit,” he explains. “I was like: ‘That’s going to work. If you can pitch it in the right place and get it to drop, he’s off balance and he’s going to be slow to react.

“You have to have a good back-of-the-hand slower ball to do it, for the top-spin more than anything else. That’s a difficult delivery to bowl in itself – Rikki bowled it very well.”

Clarke adds: “With slower ball bouncers, people are deceiving batters with what looks like a quick bouncer. The batter gets ready for a quick bouncer, they see a quick bouncer, their hands are already going through to play the shot. That’s when they then have to adjust to slow their hands down either to tap it on its head for one or adjust their hands quickly for a more powerful shot.

“It was no different with this double-bouncer we were working on. It was a case of giving everything into your action – maybe even grunting a little bit to make it really sound like an effort ball.”

^{Rikki Clarke, now of Surrey, in action for Warwickshire}

For Welch, the situation tied into a wider frustration. “In this day and age, you need every delivery,” he stresses. “Whether it’s a wide yorker, a slower ball yorker, a bouncer. There are about seven or eight different deliveries. The thing is, it’s disguising them with the field setting as well. Do you double-bluff? Do you bluff? Do you double-double-bluff? It’s always trying to be one step ahead. It’s a really difficult thing being a bowler.”

It is tough to pinpoint the last genuine innovation introduced to seam bowling in white-ball cricket. New variations are being developed all the time, but the normalisation of the slower ball bouncer must rank as the most recent radical shift in the armoury.

“If you speak to David Lloyd, he’s just like: ‘It’s just a rank long-hop,’” Clarke says. “But now it’s a delivery that stops batters getting a full swing at the ball. You look at Pat Brown – he’s mastered it perfectly. People can’t hit him. His success has seen him get picked for England off the back of it.”

Welch’s thoughts return to the innovation that never was – hard evidence that cricket remains a batsman’s game. As the pressure on bowlers increases, the demand never disappears for anything that might possibly nudge the scales back in the favour of those tasked with stopping the batsmen of today. It has often been a thankless task.

“You run up, let go of the ball and they have to try to hit it out of the ground,” he laughs. “More times than not, that’s what they do. That’s what I love about it, that’s the beauty of it. It’s about thinking differently and thinking outside the box.”

While the doubler-bouncer itself is no longer an option, the initial premise remains a relatively untapped commodity – a back-of-the-hand delivery dipping towards a second bounce as it falls towards the batsman’s toes.

“We’re going to practise it again,” Welch insists with a chuckle. “I’m going to try it again.”

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