Simon Hughes
What's it all About? – Chinaman
Very occasionally, you'll hear commentators going on about a
chinaman. The origins of the name are obscure, but there might be an indirect connection with Shanghai. A chinaman is actually a ball from a normal left-arm spinner that turns the opposite way to his normal
delivery (i.e. from left to right). Basically it's the mirror image of
the right armer's leg break. There are two possible
explanations for the term. Either it was coined after Ellis Achong, a West Indian of Chinese descent, who bowled this stuff for the West Indies in the 1930s. Or, more likely, it was a very un-PC reference to the
perceived deviousness for which 'chinese' or 'chinamen' were known.
Chinaman googly
It's certainly a hard ball to play, and even harder to bowl, which explains why chinaman bowlers are rare. You'll see the odd one on the Indian sub-continent, but the only regular sighting in Test cricket is when either Australia's Michael Bevan or South Africa's Paul Adams is whistled up for a bowl. Just to complicate things even further, they can bowl the chinaman-googly, out of the back of the hand, which spins the opposite way to the chinaman and the same way as orthodox left-arm spin.
Other variations
You do get these quirky spin bowlers occasionally. One was Australia's John Gleeson, who bowled both off-breaks and leg breaks, apparently squeezing the ball out off a bent middle-finger. Another was the Indian Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, universally nicknamed 'Chandra' who snaked in off a ten-pace run to bowl lightening fast googlies, top spinners and occasional leg breaks with a withered arm. Few batsmen could read him and his ability to bowl the unplayable delivery still gives
leading adversaries of the time, like Geoff Boycott and the Chappell brothers, sleepless nights.
Double joints
Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan continues to mesmerise modern
batsmen. With a double-jointed wrist and a bowling arm he can't
completely straighten, his action has often been questioned, but there's no doubt about the prodigious spin he extracts from any pitch. He can make the ball turn literally at right angles. He took 16 of England's 20 wickets to fall at The Oval in 1998 and, at the rate he is going, could end up taking more Test wickets than anyone in history.
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Copyright © Simon Hughes 2001
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