From: andyc@is.morgan.com (Andrew Coad)
Subject: Short pitched bowling......+
Organization: Morgan Stanley - IS
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 15:10:53 GMT


Three recent postings are of interest:


>Vaibhav A. Diwadkar writes:
>
>	- After watching the last three hours of play at Adelaide yesterday,
>	it seems increasingly unlikely that the new bouncer rule has 
>	made the pitch a "safer" home for batsmen.

The one bouncer per over rule was never intended to make the world a safer place
for batsmen. It was intended to make the world a more interesting place for
spectators. The three, four (sometimes more) bouncers per over that the WI were
regularly bowling in the late 80's became so predicatble that batsmen didn't 
attempt to play them. Result: WI would keep the runs down, wouldnt take wickets
very fast, spectators got bored and went home, match drawn (recall '91 Oval test).


> Blind Boy Grunt writes:
>
> Unfortunately, as good as the West Indian bowlers are, they are quite
> defensive bowlers, in the sense that they concentrate very much on short of
> a length bowling, unlike the Pakistanis and Australians who pitch the ball
> up a lot more in order to make it swing (and consequently are easier to
> score off).

Yes! Both Pak and Aus have less to lose with the one bouncer rule than WI
because of this. Maybe Pak and Aus are easier to score off but they seem to do
fine relative to taking wickets. It would be a great exercise to figure out the
average number of balls delivered per wicket for each country. In fact I'm going
to do that right now for Aus/WI Fourth Test 1st Innings:

	Aus took 67.3 overs to dismiss WI who scored 252 runs
	WI 79.2 overs to dismiss Aus who scored 213 runs

	(Does anyone know the elapsed time of each innings?)

A single innings does not mean anything statistically and it would be good to do
this for several years of Test history. BUT, the single innings above shows that
while Aus gave up more runs, they got WI out quicker. That equates to more runs
and more wickets in any given time span and I would argue that the Wi first
innings was probably more *interesting to watch* than Aus 1st innings.

Also, for any new rule, some get affected more than others. Just like the front
foot no-ball caused Aus to bitch and moan at the time but clearly that rule was
in the best interests of the game.

>John Farrell writes (with respect to the one bouncer rule)
>
>  Yes, it is a silly rule. *All* balls over shoulder height should be no
>balls. If a bowler can't intimidate a batsman by bowling at his chest or his
>elbow, then the bowler is lacking technique.

The problem here is that it depends on how the batsman plays the shot as to where
the ball passes his body. There is a saying that the shorter pitched the ball is
the further forward you should go and probably Bradman was an example of a player
who went forward to meet the short pitched ball. Whatever. Anyway, if you move
forward or back the ball will pass you at different heights and the bowler has a
chance that he will be no-balled because of how the batsman played the ball. To
get around this you have to specify a specific point at which the batsman is
assumed to (jist like baseball) be and square leg umpire has another issue to
deal with. Also, the same delivery to John Edrich and Joel Garner would be 
illegal and legal respectively....


AC