The googly men from South Africa

Cricket owes this deadly weapon to another sport and one man's ingenuity. It 's a fascinating tale worth quoting the words of its inventor, Bosanquet."Somewhere about the year 1897 I was playing a game with a tennis ball, known as `Twisti-Twosti.' The object was to bounce the ball on a table so that your opponent sitting opposite could not catch it... After a little experimenting I managed to pitch the ball which broke in a certain direction; then with more or less the same delivery make the next ball go in the opposite direction! I practised the same thing with a soft ball at `Stump-cricket.' From this I progressed to the cricket ball...I devoted a great deal of time to practicing the googly at the nets, occasionally in unimportant matches. The first public recognition we obtained was in July, 1900, for Middlesex v. Leicestershire at Lord's. An unfortunate individual [Coe, the left-hander] had made 98 when he was stumped off a fine specimen which bounced four
times -- This small beginning marked the start of what came to be termed a revolution in bowling..."

This mysterious delivery foxed and enraged the leading batsmen like Arthur Shrewsbury who condemned it. When asked whether it was an illegal delivery, Bosanquet replied, "Not unfair chaps, only immoral.” But Bosanquet, who bowled the legendary Victor Trumper off the very first googly bowled in Australia in March 1903, couldn't quite tame his wild creation. That was left to South Africans spinners. Playing alongside Bosanquet in the Middlesex team was Reggie Schwartz, a batsman who bowled medium pace, who was quite fascinated by the 'Bosie' and took keen interest in the Englishman's experiments with this strange weapon. However, at the end of 1901 season he emigrated to South Africa. Schwartz got a chance in 1904 to reacquaint his friendship with Bosanquet and his creation when he was selected to play for South Africa on a tour of England. He ran straight into the wiles of Bosanquet in the very first match of the tour, the googly bowler picking up nine wickets for MCC. That Art is truly international was proved when an eager disciple in Schwartz found a willing guru in Bosenquet who passed on the secrets of the wrong'un. By the time the fourth match started against Oxford, Reggie was amusing his team-mates by practicing the delivery in nets and then to their amazement, in the second innings of the match, he grabbed five wickets for 27 runs in just over five overs. By the end of the tour, he went on to top the bowling averages, scalping 96 bewildered victims at 14.81.

Schwartz then spread the gospel. Albert 'Ernie' Vogler, the legspinner, Gordon White, South Africa's premier batsman, and Aubrey Faulkner, an allrounder, were his disciples and soon, on the matting wickets of South Africa, they deceived hapless batsmen with bounce, turn and the break-back. The fab four way-laid the Englishmen who toured under Plum Warner in 1905 and demolished them when South Africa toured England in 1907 - Schwartz with his googlies, Vogler with his legbreaks mixed with surprise wrong'uns and a slow yorker with which he dismissed CB Fry twice in Test matches, Faulkner with his faster breaks and White with well- concealed googlies.

Ranji Hordern, called Ranji due to his swarthy complexion was probably the first Australian who bowled googly. Hordern, who studied to become a doctor in USA, was spotted by Warren Bardsley, the former Australian player who as selector of New South Wales picked him up for NSW and Hordern soon graduated to play against England in 1911, grabbing 12 wickets. In the Test series against England in 1911-12 he bagged 32 wickets.

Post the WWI, South Africa introduced turf wickets, a surface not conductive to spin bowling and spin slowly died away from that country. The googly developed further down under.

Bosanquet, the creator, lost his way as a bowler, fading out of the scene. Vogler, whom RE Foster rated in 1908 as "the greatest bowler playing cricket in either hemisphere at the present time", strangely, did little after those heady days of 1907.

Aubrey Faulkner, a supreme allrounder with a strange batting grip, and who in the words of AA Thomson, "seemed to be able to do everything he wished and to do it serenely ... Over a period of years [he] was almost in a position on to toss up in any given game whether he wished to be regarded as South Africa's most brilliant batsman or most deadly bowler". Sometimes even he found his match, once in particular, in Jack Hobbs. Herbert Strudwick, the former England wicketkeeper, tells a delightful anecdote on the two. "I remember G. A. Faulkner after an England tour in South Africa, saying to Jack: I only bowled you one googly." "Why," said Jack, "I didn't know you bowled one." Faulkner said: "You hit the first one I bowled for four. If you didn't know it, how did you know it would turn from the off?"

"I didn't" answered Jack. "I watched it off the pitch."

Faulkner went on to become a very good coach and started a cricket school - Ian Peebles, KS Duleepsinhji were his among his famous pupils. However, he was prone to manic depression and on September 10 1930, he locked himself in the storeroom of his cricket school and turned on the gas leaving behind a poignant note - "I am off to another world via the bat room".

Reggie Schwartz, the man responsible for the spread of the googly, served in WWI and died of influenza, one week after the armistice ending the war was signed .Gordon White died of wounds in the war, again tragically, just one month before the signing of the armistice.

It's ironic, against this backdrop of Vogler and his pupils who tamed the wild googly that the South Africans, currently toured India with a lone spinner, who converted from bowling fast to spin just a few months back. However, the South Africans might point out that Reggie Schwartz himself was a convert from pace to spin or for that matter the inventor himself in his oxford days used to bowl medium pace. Ah!