The speed gun is killing swing

[chinaman]

Wasim Akram reveals a few secrets of his success, but not all. The interview was conducted during the Sydney Test in January, and appeared in the February 2004 issue of Wisden Asia Cricket and now in cricinfo.

Few Quotes:

Swing is all about using the wrist. Seam bowling is about hitting the seam consistently, but on most Indian and Pakistani wickets there is no seam movement. So you have to use your wrists and learn to swing.

Reverse swing is easier to control. Bowling with the new ball and controlling the swing is more difficult. That's why you get a lot of wide balls with the new ball.

With reverse swing, you need pace, but with the new ball you need control and skill. I could bowl big inswingers with the new ball and then I could take one away. That gets you wickets.

Your wrist could go a little this way or that, and you might have thought that you had bowled an inswinger and it could go out. That's why you had to keep the ball around the off stump, so that whichever way it went, it would still trouble the batsman. And the beauty of it is that if you didn't know which way the ball would go, neither would the batsman.

With the new ball, of course, it didn't matter much because the shine was the same and the batsman tried to read the swing from your wrist, but with the old ball you could judge which way it would go by looking at the shine.

When we did it, it was ball-tampering. People were just baffled; they didn't understand what was happening. And we came from the subcontinent. .... Now of course, everybody understands it. So it's called reverse swing.

Nowadays you see bowlers like Mohammad Sami, Ajit Agarkar – they all have a quick arm action, which makes the ball skid on. It's a blessing.

And then you have a guy like Aamir Sohail, who is a joke, as the chief selector. What do you expect? Majid Khan was one. He didn't know how to handle the boys. He even stopped our mineral water saying it was expensive, though we were getting it free.

Complete Interview