Brett Geeves: You can’t get the ball truly reversing without cheating
BALL tampering.
YES!!
Nothing spices up a cricket contest like one team risking their match fee to get the ball reverse swingin’.
I’ve gotta say, rightly or wrongly, the lure of getting caught is so worth it. Because when the ball goes reverse — think England in 2005 — it is damn near impossible to survive, let alone score.
Let me tell you this though: you can’t get the ball truly reversing without cheating.
The science of reverse swing is complicated and to attempt to break it down for you would have you asleep and me wearing a shiny tin foil hat and scribbling red markings on my living room walls. Words like asymmetry and turbulent flow and Troy Cooley.
The simple breakdown: one side needs to be smooth and shiny. The other side is rough, like sand paper and hopefully with the odd chunk of leather missing. The air flow that once loved the rough side of conventional swing now chooses the smoother side because of the extreme turbulence caused by the harsh nature of the rough surface. In much the same way Uncle Bob now wears her best heels to Xmas lunch. It’s complicated, so we should move forward. Quickly.
Make no mistake, England have proven themselves as the masters when it comes to the cunning required to get it hoopin’.
Remember 2005 from a few pars ago? When Simon Jones decimated Australia’s middle order with super late movement through the air — both ways — that made him more dangerous than Uncle Chop Chop in his heyday?
None of it from conventional swing. All of it from the cunning of dirty play. And all of these words, staking a claim at greatness, from the mouth of the man responsible, Marcus Trescothick.
“Through trial and error, I finally settled on the best type of spit for the task at hand,” he wrote in his autobiography, Coming Back to Me.
“It had been common knowledge in county cricket for some time that certain sweets produced saliva which, when applied to the ball for cleaning purposes, enabled it to keep its shine for longer and therefore its swing.”
Picture it now: smashed beakers and test tubes sprawled all over the back of the nets with vials of animal saliva and a whole production line of slobbering blokes waiting to be part of this revolutionary experiment.
In the end, they got it right, or wrong, depending on how you perceive rule breaking.
But it’s not just lollies and the smooth side of the ball that needs the attention of the cunning.
The foreplay of the rough side is the one that will bring about the most heinous of shame should you get caught. And nothing says heinous like a bottle top, an extra-long thumb nail or some sandpaper. Some, like the Pakistanis, have even been caught out taking a bite!!
Hiding a bite from the 40 TV cameras and 50 boundary side photographers is harder than escaping from Olivia Newton John.
Remember Rana Naveed from Pakistan and cult hero of the Hobart Hurricanes and Tasmanian Tigers T20 teams? The man had a freak thumbnail that was not only useful at barbecues for opening local brew, but he could very secretly beaver away at the new white ball and have it reversing in two overs.
You don’t come to Australia and blow that many pads open at 130kph without a little something in your arsenal.
Through Rana, I’ve seen the best of reverse swing; he was a wizard.
And anytime Tasmania played NSW at the SCG, I was responsible for the worst.
I recall a team discussion, in 2007-08, about why we couldn’t get the ball to reverse. Our only option was the spit rock; which is an old-fashioned way of getting reverse swing.
In a nut shell, you dump as much spit as you can onto one side of the ball, rub it in, and then lob it to the next bloke who does the exact same thing. The upshot is that buying bulk cold-sore cream is efficient for price. The downside is that the swing is from the hand, very hard to swing both ways, and extremely predictable.
The short answer was that we had no one willing to cheat.
I put my hand up — public school, I’ve done worse — and it was felt that chap stick was our answer for the shiny side, and the zip on my pants would be helpful for the rough side.
With everyone scratching their bleeding lips and New South Wales declaring at 5-517, it was obvious that my ability to cheat in cricket was not near my ability to deal myself the left and right bower from the bottom of the deck.
And then came reverse swing greatness.
Bollinger and Bracken combining for match figures of 78 overs, 27 maidens, 18 for 208 — bowling Tasmania out twice for under 517 — compared to Geeves and Hilfenhaus: 60 overs, 10 maidens, 3 for 231.
In chatting to the NSW bowlers after the game, they refused to provide the answers on how they got the ball talking. They did, however, let me know they got great joy watching me apply 16 tubs of chap stick through my lips to the ball knowing full well that what I was doing meant that I was actually ruining any chance of reverse or conventional swing.
Chap stick, for those of you with inner cunning, is not the answer.
English sweets, excessively sharp fingernails and Boag’s bottle tops are your friends if you want to engage your inner cunning.
It’s funny, you know; get caught cheating at golf, a game of pool, or at cards and you are the lowest form of human. A truly vile creature.
Cheat at Cricket? MBE’s for everyone; even Paul Collingwood.
Source Link:https://www.foxsports.com.au/cricke...g/news-story/39c2a8e6af60d90978ed20a76fb08469
