Slow: the new fast

Lovers of that niche but noble genre cricket fiction will remember Arthur Conan-Doyle's tremendous short story Spedegue's Dropper, about an asthmatic school teacher from the New Forest who develops an entirely new and unplayable delivery which drops directly onto the batsman's stumps from a great height. 

Even back in 1928, when Doyle first published Spedegue, there was a kind of mystery attached to very slow bowling. Inherent in it are the headgames it provokes, the psychological screw it turns on the batsman. Because, somewhere in the psyche, slow equals easy, or at least easier. The risk of physical damage is removed for a start, as is the need for razor-sharp reaction. And it's usually bowled by an old bloke. 

And then you try and hit it, as it thuds, dull as a shot put, into the pitch... as it crawls towards you, shedding velocity all the way... as it offers no leeway, no get out clause, no mental soft-landing... It's slow, and you should murder it, muller it, smash it out of sight... But you know - what if it spins? What if it bounces? What if it grubs along the ground? You have time to think all of this and more, and all the time, in your head, an almost audible voice... 'I've got to get four here, or six, because you know... it's slow...'

All of a sudden, because you absolutely have to, because your brain can't find a good reason not to, because everything you've ever known about the game tells you so... you can't. You hit it straight to a fielder, or you swing too hard and miscue it, or you decide to just knock it for one and take a look from the other end, or - oh sweet baby jeebus - you slog like Afridi and hit it 300 feet, straight up...

Perhaps the really slow one is making a comeback. Tom Redfern at Get A Hundred got done by this one - and joined Dessie Haynes and Jimmy Adams in falling to the same guy. Jrod, who apparently spent the summer bathing, Kallis-like, in red ink, came to the lovely realisation that one ultra-slowie 'made people question themselves'. Even the Old Batsman himself was tormented by a lob-bowling psycho who could barely get his arm over, and yet bowled me four dot balls in a row - in a Twenty20 game...

Not since Chris Harris or the man who so successfully stopped South Africa choking, Jeremy Snape, has a moonballer appeared in the pro ranks, but maybe that will change in 2010. After all, it's been working for a century or more.

NB: I remain convinced that the way to play Ajantha Mendis is to just pretend he's Paul Collingwood, bowling slow cutters...