Above – Left Johnny Gleeson’s grip, right Jack Iverson’s grip, demonstration of Iverson flicking the

ball out from the middle finger.

Wanted: A Ball that Deceives

Johnny Gleeson

It started I guess, with B.J.T Bosanquet, who at Oxford University in the

1890’s invented a delivery of his own, variously known as the googly,
wrong-un or bosey. He developed it first for a game in which you
bounced a table tennis ball on a table so that your opponent on the other
side of the net failed to detect which way it turned after bouncing. He said
he bowled it on cricket fields to avoid bowling fast on hot afternoons. He
later described in Wisden how he was led out onto the field at the lunch
or tea interval at Oxford to amuse the crowd by bowling his strange ball
to batsman, whose failure to pick the break brought roars of laughter.

In 1903-04, Bosanquet was selected in the MCC team which toured

Australia and with the first bosey ever bowled in Australia is said to have
clean bowled Victor Trumper. He bowled splendidly in the Third Test of
that series and won the decisive Fourth Test by taking 6 for 51 in the
second innings, his victims including Glem Hill, Hopkins, McLeod and
Trumble. His length was sometimes astray but when he controlled the
bosey he was devastating.

In 1905 he won the Nottingham Test for England against Australia by

taking 8 for 107 off 32.4 overs. Then he retired aged 26, probably
thinking he had injected all the originality he could into cricket.

Until Bosanquet came along, the off-break and leg break had been
accepted as the spin bowler’s sole means of hoodwinking the batsman,
with perhaps an occasional top spinner for variety. By producing a ball
delivered with a leg-break action which turned from the off, Bosanquet
made a remarkable contribution to that repertoire. Slow bowlers all over
the world copied his invention, among them many Australians, and
probably a lot of those who followed Bosanquet bowled it with more
control than he ever had over it.

Years later came the flipper, a bosey or wrong-un which hastens off the
pitch with top spin. Very few, probably not more than half a dozen, have
been able to bowl it and all who acquired it did so only after years of
practice. Bruce Dooland says in this book that the flipper was invented by
wrist spinner Clarrie Grimmett in Grimmett’s fortieth year. Richie
Benaud bowled it when he was in his prime, and was the only bowler in
the world then using it.

Benaud learnt the flipper from Dooland, during his term at Nottingham
frequently mesmerised English batsman with it. Nothing bowled in
English cricket at that time could so completely surprise a batsman such
as the flipper – except perhaps the “Chinaman” bowled by the Australian
Jack Walsh for Nothants. A “Chinaman”, for the uninitiated, is the left
hander’s wrong-un.

Emulating Iverson

My own interest in bowling something nobody else bowled, a ball of my

own invention, started at about the time Victorian Jack Iverson was
winning headlines with his bent finger off-breaks and top spinners.
Iverson learnt the trick, like Bosanquet, fooling about on a ping pong
table, and since he used his unique grip successfully in Tests there have
been quite a few young Australians making similar experiments.

I had my delivery – bowled with two fingers, the thumb and middle
finger, behind the ball for about ten years before I used it in a match. I
bowled it only in practice and had no idea of its value. The first time I let
it go was against a group of school kids on a paspalum wicket with a
jacaranda tree for stumps. Some bemusing performance followed
including 8 for 13 of 12 overs for Tamworth Police Boy’s Club against
Atlunga (the 13 runs include being hit for six into the dressing room!),
before I started flying to play in Sydney to further my cricket ambitions.

Even if I had never taken another wicket with it, I am convinced that the
success I have had with the grip and the success Iverson had with a
similar grip opens up the possibility of further types of spinning
deliveries being discovered some time in the future. We have far from
exhausted the possible arrangements of fingers, wrist, seam and palm
which will produce spin bowling. There is more to come.

My experiments have shown that for my shape of hand at least, it has to

be the middle finger I put behind the ball. I can’t get any spin at all on the
ball by bending other fingers behind it, and lose all control of direction.
My thumb has always been a bit “dicky” and bent, and seemed to just
naturally go in behind the ball to support the middle finger for this grip.

I started using the grip on a tennis ball which I propelled for about fifteen
yards, but fairly quickly I discovered I could deliver a cricket ball the full
length with it. Perhaps it has something to do with the strong fingers I
developed milking cows on my parent’s farm when I was a kid. I have
heard that others who try the Iverson grip have trouble getting the ball up
the length of the pitch. Former Test player Peter Philpott, a keen student
of cricket trends, experimented with the Iverson grip but tore a ligament
in his middle finger and was out of cricket for a month.

Doubling your range of tricks

The enormous advantage the bent finger Iverson type grip gives a bowler
is that if the batsman starts to detect it, he can revert to orthodox spin. His
entire range of deliveries is doubled, and this gives him more chance of
staying one step ahead of the batsman.

In 1965-66, I bowled 27 overs of it and took 5 for 80 against a team taken

to the NSW country town of Gunnedah by State selector Jack Chegwyn.
Richie Benaud watched me through binoculars that day. A season later
Benaud went into bat against me at the Sydney Cricket Ground nets and I
let him have an orthodox off-break with an apparent Iverson style grip.
Richie played the wrong way, thinking the ball would break from the leg,
and I bowled him first up. “I was still at Gunnedah”, said Benaud with a
smile.

I have always liked Richie, a master of spin, for that indication that I had
tricked him. I tell the story not to gloat over that little success, but in the
hope that it will press home the great possibility of having an extra ball to
add to the spinner’s traditional store of wrong-un, flippers, “Chinaman”,
top-spinners, and mundane off-breaks and leg breaks. But what to call
these balls with the fingers doubled back behind the ball….Knuckle-
breaks?………Flickers?………Finger-crushers?……..None of these
terms seem adequate.
At what Speed?

For me, the Iverson-type balls have to be delivered at a slow medium

pace, which is probably faster theoretically than spinners should operate.
I tried to bowl them slower and rely more on flight, but I found that the
batsman could play back and wait for whatever turn was on the ball.
Bowling at this pace you minimise the time the batsman have in which to
change their minds.

With the bent finger grip, the ball does not cut down sharply onto the
pitch as the orthodox leg-break do, and so the advantages of flighting the
ball well up are partly lost. Maybe someday a bowler will learn variations
of flight with the Iverson grip. But I can get an occasional ball to hang, as
I bowl with the breeze, looking for a caught and bowled if the batsman
fail to get to the pitch of the ball.

A further difficulty is that you cannot bowl the Iverson stuff at a club,
State or even Australian practice. This would give batsman against whom
you would later bowl a wonderful chance to get used to it. So you just
bowl slow orthodox spinners at the nets and rehearse the Iverson ball at
home by yourself. If you think that hiding the delivery from the
representative sides team-mates is unnecessary, let me tell you that when
the Australian team practised at the nets before the First Test against the
West Indies in 1951, Australian’s captain Lindsay Hassett refused to
allow Iverson to bowl against Arthur Morris. This irritated Morris. “What
is this?” he called to Hassett. “An Australian team at the nets or Victoria
versus NSW?”

Nobody could blame Hassett for concealing Iverson’s main weapon – the
element of surprise – against Morris. Iverson, 6 ft. 3 in, held the ball
between the thumb and third finger, which he folded against his palm. He
got sharpish turn even on good wickets, throwing in an occasional wrong-
un. He could not turn the leg-break except on worn wickets. In 1950 he
puzzled even the most experienced English batsman when he made his
Test debut at 34, taking 15 wickets at an average of 15 runs apiece. His 6
for 27 in the Third Test virtually won the match for Australia. Hassett
took Keith Miller out of slips and fielded him at mid-on, where Miller
would have his back to Iverson, during the Brisbane Test against the
West Indies. Iverson retired later that season after N.S.W hammered him,
but the principle of concealing any advantage you have in cricket remains
a sound one.
At the moment I can bowl the top-spinners, wrong-un and leg breaks with
the finger bent back behind the ball, and an orthodox leg cutter and off-
break. I am working on acquiring an orthodox leg-spinner and wrong-un,
which would give me the full range of possibilities – and on bowling
what I have got more accurately. Unquestionably, the ball turns more and
sharply with the Iverson grip, then with orthodox spinning grips.

Australian cricket has a long tradition of producing novel spin bowlers.

Dr. Horden, a disciple of Bosanquet, took the wrong-un to America when
he played the Philadelphians. Arthur Mailey’s wizardry is well known.
Leslie O’Brien Fleetwood-Smith, a left hander of highly original spinning
skill, could do extraordinary things to the ball. Grimmett……
O’Reilly…..McCool………
Tribe……..Walsh……..Dooland…….Ring………Benaud………
Sincock……..All of them were bowlers whose wrist and style of
delivery, whether it was high or low at the release point, deceived the
batsman and made the study of cricket all the more fascinating. Grimmett
was so attracted to the mysteries of spin he was still experimenting with it
in his Adelaide garden at the age of 70.

It will pay rich rewards for any young Australian prepared to carry on
that tradition and experiment until he finds a delivery of his own. One
day some lucky fellow will do it and I hope that the Iverson-style grip I
have used will help him in his deliberations. I also hope I am around to
see the fuss he starts with his new delivery.

Article taken from – ‘Cricket – The Australian Way” 1972 Jack Pollard
(Editor) Landsdown Press Melbourne