Fast bowling (cricket)

Fast bowling is one of the three main approaches to bowling in the sport of cricket, the others being spin bowling and medium-pace or swing bowling. Practitioners of pace bowling are usually known as fast bowlers, quicks, or pacemen. They can also be referred to as a seam bowler or a 'fast bowler who can swing it' to reflect the predominant characteristic of their deliveries. Strictly speaking, a pure swing bowler does not need to have a high degree of pace, although dedicated medium-pace swing bowlers are rarely seen at Test level these days.

The aim of fast bowling is to deliver the ball in such a fashion as to cause the batsman to make a mistake. This is achieved by making the hard cricket ball deviate from a predictable, linear trajectory at a speed that restricts the amount of time in which the batsman can compensate for it. For deviation caused by the ball's stitching (the seam), the ball will bounce off the pitch and deflect either away from the batsman's body, or inwards towards them. Swing bowlers on the other hand also use the seam of the ball but in a different way. To 'bowl swing' is to induce a curved trajectory of the cricket ball through the air. Swing bowlers use a combination of seam orientation, body position at the point of release, asymmetric ball polishing, and variations in delivery speed to affect an aerodynamic influence on the ball. The ability of a bowler to induce lateral deviation or 'sideways movement' obviously make it difficult for the batsman to address the flight of the ball accurately. Beyond this ability to create an unpredictable path of ball trajectory, the fastest bowlers can be equally potent by simply delivering a ball at such a rate that a batsman simply fails to react either correctly, or at all. A typical fast delivery has a speed in the range of 137–153 km/h (85–95 mph).

It is possible for a bowler to concentrate solely on speed, especially when young, but as fast bowlers mature they pick up new skills and tend to rely more on swing bowling or seam bowling techniques. Most fast bowlers will specialise in one of these two areas and will sometimes be categorised as swing or seam bowler. However, this classification is not satisfactory because the categories are not mutually exclusive and a skilled bowler will usually bowl a mixture of fast, swinging, seaming and also cutting balls, even if he prefers one style to the others. For simplicity, it is common to subdivide fast bowlers according to the average speed of their deliveries, as follows.

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