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Sam Curran has a delivery where he kind of holds the ball a little bit further back in his hand. He cocks his wrist and this is very normal, but then as he is delivering the ball, instead of flinging his wrist down, he kind of leaves it back a little bit.
While doing this, he’s also slowing his arm down a little bit, and the ball sort of floats out. It causes issues because of its lack of pace, but also it doesn’t have as much action on it. So it floats down.
The first time that this was used in the Surrey nets, his coach, Gareth Batty, basically looked at it and went, that’s gonna get hit for six every time. But spoiler alert: Curran’s moonball does not. And it’s not the first time in cricket that we’ve come up with something that doesn’t make sense to those watching, but it eventually works.
There was a spinner called Jeremy Snape who also bowled the moon ball. And if you go back into cricket history, we used to bowl underarm and there were bowlers who actually were called lob bowlers, and they would do a similar thing by tossing it up in the air and getting batters out of their rhythm.
What Curran is doing is bringing back an art that really finished around the late 1800s. But a lot of deliveries that are in T20 now actually come from baseball, or Test cricket, or just old cricket.
There’s never been more types of deliveries available than right now, and Curran’s moon ball is just the beginning of our journey.
Cricket and baseball actually start at a similar time, and they’re probably both invented in the same part of the world, southern England. Of course, eventually they diverge a lot and become very big in different countries. And there’s many reasons for that.
But one of the more fascinating things is how different the balls are. One has this big fin down the middle of it, and the other one has a sort of circular seam that goes around. But what’s fascinating about that is that baseball pitchers actually worked out how to swing their ball before bowlers did in cricket. Part of that is the fact you have to do something in the air if you’re not going to land it.
But one cricketer noticed this, Australian Fred Spofforth. He worked out that you could impart revolutions on the ball and get it to swing in any direction. He talked to scientists and read up on how baseballers did it. He believed he could get the ball to swing left, right, up and down. At the time, that sounded like madness. But now with Hawkeye data, he was exactly right. He was the first swing bowler, and many followed suit after. They realised that if you tilted the seam in either direction, you could actually get the ball to swing.
We called the ball that moved way from right-handers outswing, because most of the batters stood on that side of the stumps.
When you’re trying to curve the ball away from a right-hander, you aim the ball at first or second slip. If you want to swing it back in, you aim the ball at leg slip.