Underarm bowling
| Types | |
|---|---|
| Fast | |
| Spin | |
| Deliveries | |
| Fast | |
| Spin | |
| Other | |
| Actions | |
| Usual | Overarm |
| Other |
|
| Illegal techniques | |
In cricket, underarm (sometimes called underhand) bowling is as old as the sport itself. Until the introduction of the roundarm style in the first half of the 19th century, bowling was performed in the same way as in bowls, the ball being delivered with the hand below the waist. Bowls may well be an older game than cricket and it is possible (although unlikely) that cricket was derived from bowls by the intervention of a batsman trying to stop the ball reaching its target by hitting it away, though bowling per se continued as in bowls.
For centuries, bowling was often performed exactly as in bowls because the ball was rolled or skimmed along the ground. The bowlers may have used variations in pace but the basic action was essentially the same. There are surviving illustrations from the first half of the eighteenth century which depict the bowler with one knee bent forward and his bowling hand close to the ground, while the ball trundles (if slow) or skims (if quick) towards a batsman armed with a bat shaped something like a large hockey stick and guarding a two-stump wicket.
Cricket's first great bowling revolution occurred probably in the 1760s when bowlers started to pitch the ball instead of rolling it along the ground. The change was evolutionary and has been described as the event that took cricket out of its "pioneering phase" into what may be termed its "pre-modern phase" (i.e., which ended when overarm bowling ushered in the modern game in 1864) and effectively created a different code of cricket, just as there are now two different codes of rugby football.
The pitched delivery was established by 1772 when detailed scorecards became commonplace and the straight bat had already replaced the curved one by that time. There is no doubt that the straight bat was invented to contest the pitched delivery. It has been said that the inventor was John Small of Hambledon but it is unlikely that he actually invented it; rather, he was the first great batsman to master its use.
The 1760s are one of cricket's "Dark Ages"; a good deal more is known about the decades 1731–1750 than of 1751–1770. This has largely to do with the impact of the Seven Years' War of 1756–1763 which not only claimed the sport's manpower but also its patronage. Pitching may have begun during that period but little is known about it for it seems to have been introduced and widely accepted without the huge controversies that surrounded the later implementations of roundarm and overarm.
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Wikipedia