Posted by When it comes to seam bowling, speed is not everything – but it is something. Reverse swing is something too. Mark Wood delivered the best combination of somethings against the West Indies yesterday.
Fast reverse swing is just such a fundamentally wonderful thing. It’s so straightforward, so obvious. Its crushing impact is so easy to see.
For example, just look at this.
No asking the umpire. No punching your forearm to get a second opinion. Just out.
Three years ago, James Anderson’s delivered two near-identical reverse-swinging clean bowleds in the same over against India. It was almost perfect bowling. The only thing that could really have improved it was another 10mph.
Mark Wood has that 10mph.
One of the criteria for excellence we assessed in that Anderson article was “stump cartwheeliness”. Wood knocked Jayden Seales’ off stump straight back and when its top end jarred into the turf, it was catapulted into the air. At this point it completed two full revolutions before landing again.
It’s an either-or with rearrangement of stumps. You’re looking for either the splatteriness of Jasprit Bumrah’s yorker to Ollie Pope earlier this year or for one stump to take a long journey of pure, end-over-end, aerial majesty.
This one was the latter.
It was very satisfying.
Although it gets said a lot, it’s actually quite rare to beat a batter for pace. Bowling the ball extremely quickly can definitely make the difference though.
Even lower order batters frequently cope with fast bowling and they frequently handle swing bowling as well.
Fast swing though? Each of those qualities is enhanced by the other.
Alzarri Joseph probably would have hit this one without the swing.
He may equally have dealt with the swing had it not been sent down at 93mph.
A common conclusion about Wood’s spell at Edgbaston was that “his luck turned” after he had repeatedly beaten the bat at speeds of up to 97.1mph in the previous Test.
Our view is that if you beat the bat with a ball that’s directed at the stumps, luck doesn’t play too big a role.
Fast reverse swing has always been glorious. Fast reverse swing will always be glorious.
Here’s an easy way to read King Cricket without visiting the site. Critics are calling it “an email I open and read probably about a third of the time” and “not bad for free”.
My conjecture about reverse swing is that the ball doesn’t lose pace as it nears the bastman
So a conventional delivery starts losing pace as it approaches batsman & gives them a better chance to react but with reverse, for a given release velocity, the ball minimizes the time taken to reach batsman
As a batsman, your best strategy to survive reverse might be
a) anticipate the reverse swing
b) cut out the back swing, so you get more reaction time
I think the fact that Wood was 0-30ish before finishing 5-40 makes it even better.
Arguably the fact that the 5 wickets taken were the last 5 in some ways detracts from the spell as a ‘Great Bowling Spells’ contender but the redemption arc, at the end of a series where everyone seemingly agreed that Mark Wood Had Been Unlucky, added a bit of drama.
I’m not normally one to favour pure pace over the art of swing, but when the numbers get up into the 90s it does indisputably make it more fun to watch. Plus the stumps end up further apart, which is obviously the best bit about anyone getting bowled.
That’s really the classic format. England v Pakistan at Headingley in 1992: Waqar Younis laser-boomeranged 5 for 13 in 38 balls, having taken 0-104 until that point.
Laser Boomerang sounds like something that’ll be opening in the Arndale in early 2026 to replace the space left when some midsized retailer goes out of business
‘Have you taken the kids to the new Laser Boomerang thing in town yet?’
‘Yeah – it was fun but too pricey, can’t see us going a second time’
It was truly wonderful though, regardless of the batters dismissed. Two clean-bowled cartwheeling stumps, one plumb LBW of a batter falling over the ball, a clear and loud nick through to the keeper and a decent slip catch. I noticed the first wicket or two were deliveries around 88mph – among his slowest of the series; so much as I’d like to see him charging in at full pace it doesn’t seem necessary to clean up the tail. That’s just air speed though and speed off the pitch isn’t accounted for; while he bowled faster at Trent Bridge (I was there so I should know) it was a docile featherbed compared to Edgbaston.
Or this, which we haven’t been to.
https://sixescricket.com/
I’ve been in for a drink but not to have a go at the ‘activity’. It was very early days for them so I don’t want to be too harsh but their payment setup wasn’t working properly and so when we tried to leave they suggested to us that we hadn’t paid for our drinks, which was only resolved by me calling over the person who had taken payment (which they remembered doing because, with the payment system not really working, taking my payment had taken an age).
Seems like a fun idea if you like that sort of thing, though. There’s also a baseball version nearby which I think is a bit more lo-fi.
I have never felt more unutterably seen than reading this, KC…
“It also creates a pretty deep-seated loathing of batsmen in general. If you’ve spent whole days watching them gambol about without a care in the world, waving their bats to the crowd with smiles plastered across their smug little faces, then you want to see them knocked down a peg or 40. You want to see their precious stumps spread from third man to fine leg, and you want them to be lying on the ground, not knowing what happened, with their dignity in tatters, when it happens. I don’t enjoy seeing batsmen hurt, but the occasional broken toe was collateral damage in an ongoing war.”
Bravo.
Damn batters. Deserve everything they get.
The thing about the toe crusher length delivery is that the pitch takes precisely 0% of the speed out of the delivery, only the tiny amount of air friction slowing it down almost imperceptibly.
That is why the fast Yorker is so powerful a weapon.
If you add to that weapon reverse swing, which tends to occur late, it is a very powerful weapon indeed. Hence so many bowled and LBW dismissals that way – the latter often bruising more than just the ego and/or breaking more than just the spirit.
Top order batsmen would have struggled against Mark Wood on Sunday afternoon. That spell was breathtaking.