The Fastest Men Alive

[6ry4nj]

How can height be a determining factor for the effectiveness of pace bowling, when very effective bowlers (eg. Malinga) deliberately take height off their delivery position through their low action???!!!

I can believe there are coaches enforcing this crap - the problem even seems to have got worse over the decades rather than better! Nevertheless, the sooner these dinosaurs (and in general education theory hammering square pegs into round holes has been discredited roughly since the Cretaceous) hit an extinction event, the better for all of us...

 

[darthlewis1]

^ very good point. too many coaches, especially here in england try and mould a player into what they like rather than encouraging a little bit of "rawness".

And that's why we'll probably never have any english players at proffessional level like malinga or murali.

 

[Ollie_H]

And that's why we'll probably never have any english players at proffessional level like malinga or murali.

That isn't true at all. Sri Lanka produce the likes of Malinga and Murali due to the amount of tape/tennis ball cricket played at a young age, it's been well documented. With Malinga, if you bowl with any normal action with a tennis ball you get severe bounce which makes it incredibly difficult to get bowled's if you try Malinga's action with a tennis ball it's skids on, doesn't bounce as high and you are then back in contention with LBW and Bowled's.

That's why you get people like Mendis too, kids at a young age in Sri Lanka will try everything possible to gain an advantage in tennis ball cricket so by him bowling the way he does he's always a bit of a 'magician' (until found out on the International scene) so would have been pretty good at tennis ball cricket.

In England you still get people with 'different' styles but you will never get the mystery cricketers Sri Lanka do because if we start the game at a young age we're playing proper cricket not just cricket in the streets with a tennis ball. It's the difference between a highly establish cricket board and a still fairly new one (only around 20/30 years old).

 

[STLIndian]

That isn't true at all. Sri Lanka produce the likes of Malinga and Murali due to the amount of tape/tennis ball cricket played at a young age, it's been well documented. With Malinga, if you bowl with any normal action with a tennis ball you get severe bounce which makes it incredibly difficult to get bowled's if you try Malinga's action with a tennis ball it's skids on, doesn't bounce as high and you are then back in contention with LBW and Bowled's.

That's why you get people like Mendis too, kids at a young age in Sri Lanka will try everything possible to gain an advantage in tennis ball cricket so by him bowling the way he does he's always a bit of a 'magician' (until found out on the International scene) so would have been pretty good at tennis ball cricket.

In England you still get people with 'different' styles but you will never get the mystery cricketers Sri Lanka do because if we start the game at a young age we're playing proper cricket not just cricket in the streets with a tennis ball. It's the difference between a highly establish cricket board and a still fairly new one (only around 20/30 years old).

I think that's overanalysis. India and Pakistan are basically the same as SL when it comes to type of cricket played and street cricket, and both of those countries' bowlers are "normal"/orthodox.

And it's not like "proper" cricket countries don't produce slingers or weird actions. Shaun Tait doesn't have an orthodox action (although obviously isn't as extreme as Malinga).

Malinga/Murali/Mendis being unorthodox as they are is more coincidence than anything else, IMO.

 

[Ollie_H]

It's not over-analysis at all, it's incredibly true, even Pakistan have these mystery unorthodox cricketers. It's well documented that Sri Lanka produce these mystery cricketers because of the nature of the cricket played in Sri Lanka and other sub continent areas.

Look at it in theory, India was granted test status in 1932 so their system will be incredibly well structured much so that youth cricket I imagine is prominent and coached to a big extent and there isn't many 'mystery' cricketers. Pakistan was given test status in 1952 and they produce a few 'mystery' cricketers, more than India but less than Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka will celebrate their 30th year as a test nation next year and produce a variety of mystery cricketers and if you can give me any other reasoning other than it being 'coincidence' then I'm willing to listen to it.

I never said that the older cricketing nations didn't produce mystery cricketers, I agreed that they do but they are less prodigious due to the abundance of cricket facilities available and coaching that is there. In absolutely no way am I slamming Sri Lankan cricket and the structure of their cricket board for the cricketing youth it's fantastic for the game to see these unorthodox cricketers and it works for them.

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Also, to add. I'm not saying there are no coaches at youth level in Sri Lanka but these un-orthodoxies in Sri Lankan players are brought about through the street cricket played as youngsters. The coaches do play a role in not changing their style, but I think as more 'traditional' cricket playing countries places like England are far less likely to produce magic cricketers.

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Two parts to that;

Pradeep doesn?t look as strong, his round-arm is not quite the slingshot, he is not quite the Malinga, but he has attributes: pace, and according to observers, outswing and reverse-swing. The pace and the round-arm action come because the tennis balls wouldn?t travel

Hard bowlers created by softballs.

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And one final piece to add to my arguement;

Freak streak -Sri Lanka has produced some of the most effective unorthodox cricketers over the last 20 years - Sri Lanka

Malinga, for example, naturally developed his action playing softball cricket. In that form of the game, the one way to bowl really fast is with a slingy action, which also gives a low trajectory to the ball, making it hard for the batsman to hit it. Malinga has applied that technique beautifully and effectively in international cricket.

Still, you can`t really pinpoint any one reason for unorthodox talent coming through. It just happens. Mendis and Malinga are two such who slipped through.

 

[cricket_icon]

i read somewhere that it is actually the fact that malinga played cricket on the beach so much that lead him to develop his unusual action. a tennis bowl just doesnt bounce enough on sandy surfaces and is slwoed down remarkably, so im guessing his action was developed to skid the ball off the surface and rush the batsmen.