Unplayable! (part ii)

Warne to Gatting, Starc to Vince and lots of people to Ollie Pope... Our search for the perfect pill continues

Neck and Crop… Bumrah does for Pope in Vizag

Has any delivery been genuinely unplayable? Can you think of a single ball that would have defeated every person that faced it? Yesterday we looked at Holding to Boycott in Barbados. Today, a couple more contenders…

Let’s consider two from recent history. The first is widely heralded: Shane Warne’s Ball of the Century to Mike Gatting at Old Trafford in 1993. This delivery, like Michael Holding’s from part one, also needs its context, and that context is the element of surprise, even shock, that accompanied it.

In those distant days before video analysis, Warne was little-known to the England side, and leg spin as an art form was essentially dead. There were few reference points, and that was how Australia liked it. In the warm-up games, Allan Border had hidden Warne away, instructing him not to bowl any of his variations in a game at Worcester, where he’d been taken apart by Graeme Hick, and then withdrawing him from the match with Middlesex, which meant that Gatting had not seen him bowl before he faced up to that first ball in Manchester.

Gatt, it is fair to say, had no idea what he was in for as Warne spun it from way outside leg to hit the top of off, the ball obeying the Magnus Effect, which makes it swerve out beyond Gatting’s pads before dipping and biting deep into the pitch. Like Michael Holding in Barbados, given the context in which it was bowled, the ball would probably have got anyone out – well, any right hander out.

And yet, when I was writing about Warne in Bat, Ball & Field, I found a quote from Andy Barker, who had captained Warne at Accrington CC during Warne’s season there in 1991. Barker said: “We had a little chuckle when people called it the Ball of the Century, because we’d seen it week in and week out two years before against lesser batsmen, so we knew all about it when it got Mike Gatting out.”

Warne would go on to produce deliveries like the Ball of the Century again and again throughout his career. And he could bowl them to lefties, too – I remember the one he spun across Andrew Strauss in 2005 that Strauss tried and failed to kick away, so far had it pitched outside his off stump. They didn’t all result in wickets, but by then batters knew what to expect. They had an advantage that Mike Gatting did not. It’s impossible to imagine any batter in international cricket today facing a bowler that they understood so little about, and that bowler producing something so perfect first up.

Gatting has said subsequently that maybe he could have swept the Ball of the Century, but there might be some retrospective rationalisation going on there. Not that Gatt couldn’t sweep, and he was a gleeful murderer of spinners with those axe-wielding forearms of his. I was once at Lord’s watching a Sunday League game with Gatt batting for Middlesex. The pitch was way over to the Tavern side of the square, and we were sitting side on to the wicket. Gatting swept one hard and flat and it flew directly at us, a humming red smear that arrived like a bullet. It only just missed. Oh yes, Gatt could sweep. But why would he sweep, early in the first innings of a Test match, back then when the game was so very different?

The second delivery, and I think probably the ball in modern history that has the most claim to being genuinely unplayable, was received by the batsman once statistically proven to be the unluckiest in Test cricket, James Vince.

That stat had to do with the number of Vince’s false shots that led to his dismissal. He was out about once every six false shots compared to one in twelve for most international players. That stat was related to another – that Vince scored a much higher percentage of his runs in boundaries than most other players, too. The opposing captains knew he liked to drive and so packed the slip cordon, meaning that more chances were likely to go to hand.

Who knows, maybe it was even true. One of Vince’s greatest pieces of misfortune came against Australia at Perth in 2017. He’d been a Hail Mary pick for the Ashes tour and was told that he would be going in at number three, where he rarely batted for Hampshire. But it was a chance and he took it, scoring 83 on the first morning at Brisbane before running himself out.

Australia suited his game. Even though England were getting their traditional hiding, Vince went out at Perth in England’s second innings and batted like god. He had made 55 with twelve sweet boundaries (twelve!) and was facing Mitchell Starc bowling around the wicket.

What happened next was ridiculous, absurd, almost unbelievable. Starc bowled a fast, good length ball that was headed well down the leg side given the angle he’d delivered it from. Vince shaped to tuck it off his legs, the ball hit a crack and deviated from another stump’s width outside leg into the top of off at a speed of more than 80mph.

Not even Specsavers could have helped Vincey with this one…

Starc – rather ungallantly, I thought – celebrated as though he had meant it, and in so far as he might have been aiming into the cracked area of the pitch, maybe he did.

There have been other flukes, mostly pea-rollers like the one that Carl Hooper bowled to Nasser Hussain, but arguably another batter could have jammed down on those just in time. Anyone facing the Starc ball had no chance of correcting to the degree required. However it was intended, Mitchell Starc had bowled a ball that I think would have got out literally anyone that faced it.

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When I interviewed James Vince on his car phone, there was another delivery I wanted to ask about. That had come when he first went in at Brisbane, and Starc was the bowler then, too. He’d sent down a vicious, inswinging yorker that Vince had patted away as if it was an underarm throwdown, so much time did he seem to have. I mentioned it to him and he said he couldn’t remember it. Oh to be that good…

It was the kind of delivery with which England’s current incumbent at number three Ollie Pope has struggled to keep out. In fact, the stats suggest there’s quite a lot he struggles to keep out: as Simon Wilde reported after the Manchester Test, Pope has been dismissed within his first 25 deliveries in 43 per cent of his innings, which seems suboptimal.

But then maybe he, like Vince, is simply unlucky. In the first innings at Manchester he was bowled neck and crop by Asitha Fernando with a delivery that was – you guessed it – called unplayable on commentary. Now, allowing for a bit of excitable hyperbole, ‘unplayable’ is a word quite often hurled around on commentary. This one simply held its line and hit the top of off, deviating by no more than a bat width, if that.

Feet rooted to the popping crease, Pope folded like a seaside deckchair over the top of it. The ball was certainly made to look unplayable by Ollie Pope, but I don’t think it’s too unkind to say someone else could have kept it out. Indeed Joe Root and Jamie Smith seemed to keep lots of almost identical deliveries out simply by moving their feet, getting forward and not toppling over.

Here lay the truth about unplayable deliveries. What’s unplayable to one batter, with their faults and foibles, is bread and butter to another. Pope seems susceptible to ‘unplayable’ deliveries, and to being clean bowled. Sky put together a highlights (lowlights?) package that saw him castled spectacularly by a Jasprit Bumrah yorker in Vizag. Bumrah had also done Pope with a similar delivery at the Oval in 2021, and there were several more on tape, too.

Another glance at the stats shows that when facing right armers in Test cricket, Pope has been bowled in 19 of 52 innings, or more than 30 per cent of the time, a worryingly high figure for any top class batter.

The average is around 20 per cent, or one in five. To return to where we began yesterday, Geoffrey Boycott had batted on 168 occasions in Test matches by the time he faced Michael Holding in Barbados, and been bowled 27 times, or put another way, in 16 per cent of his innings.

He had received more than 30,000 deliveries in that time, which meant that any single ball had a 0.5 per cent chance of getting him out. The chance of being clean bowled was 16 per cent of that 0.5 per cent, or 0.08 per cent.

Those were the odds that Michael Holding beat when he sent down that immortal over, and its crushing sixth and final delivery. Geoffrey may not think it was completely unplayable, but it was maybe as close as you can get.

NB: There are other candidates for the unplayable ball. Jim Suggested Ryan Harris to Alastair Cook at Perth in 2013 (what is it about the lightning fast and cracked WACA pitch and the unplayable?), a delivery that moved about three different ways at the same time, and was voted Ball of the Century (2000s version) by ESPN Cricinfo. What else? Would love to hear your nominations, and if we get enough, we can do a follow up piece. Hit us up here or on the socials…