Welcome back to our run-down of the 10 very best seam positions in men’s Test cricket! If you missed part 1 where we dissected numbers 10-6 (and also why I limited myself to men’s Test cricket), read before you proceed.
And now, proceed!
NUMBER 5: PAT CUMMINS (AUSTRALIA)
As it turned out, Vernon Philander wasn’t the only debutant in the South Africa-Australia series of November 2011 who would become an outstanding bowler. But for five and a half long, frustrating, painful years, it looked like Pat Cummins’ match-winning emergence onto the Test scene in Johannesburg would be a false and all too brief dawn.
It isn’t quite fair to say that he came out of the wilderness when he was called up to replace the injured Mitchell Starc for the 3rd Test of Australia’s tour of India in 2017: after all, this was a World Cup winner who’d taken 51 wickets in 28 ODIs at 25.54. But for a man who’d endured three stress fractures of the back in four years, being called upon to be one of only two fast bowlers in the sapping heat of an Indian spring was a huge ask. But this Pat Cummins was up to the challenge.
How he got there is well-chronicled, not least in a recent feature in the Cricket Monthly. What he did once there was impressive, repeatedly forcing India’s batters onto the back foot even on a flat pitch as he took 4 of the 9 wickets to fall in India’s only innings, and even more impressively getting through 39 punishing overs and following it up just a few days later with an even faster display in Dharamsala. Australia lost the Test and the series, but had won back a superstar.
Since his comeback, only Nathan Lyon has taken more Test wickets. Of the top 10, only James Anderson has a better average than his 21.90. The physical endurance is clear to see, but what we’re concerned with is the skill, and there’s plenty of that too.
It says a lot for Cummins’ supreme technique that you wouldn’t know unless told that he has a portion of his middle finger missing on his bowling hand. This is usually the last point of contact with the ball, the middle finger rolling back over the seam to help keep it upright - but Cummins finds a way, as England captain Joe Root can testify. Cummins talks through in great detail how he set Root up for his lbw dismissal in the first innings at the Gabba on England’s last tour Down Under, including a mention of the importance of wrist position for the inswinger, so let’s deep-dive on that ball:
Root’s tendency early in his innings to step across to the off-side is well known, so much so that Root has recently made a technical change to try and eliminate it, and this perfectly delivered inswinger exploited that to perfection - we can see Root’s head ending up way outside the line of the ball as it thuds into his pad - and it was all made possible by that seam, upright and angled towards leg slip.
Cummins even makes a virtue of the wobble-seam, long thought of as a failure of technique but rapidly becoming a weapon for fast bowlers - the art of bowling on a line and length such that whether the ball moves in or out is a subtle but rewarding one, and adds yet more uncertainty to facing Cummins. See how this ball to Jos Buttler from this summer’s Edgbaston Test deviates in the air:
Wobble out, wobble in, but seam always upright, on a perfect length, and Buttler had no option but to play the original line and hope it hit the middle of the bat. Spoiler: it didn’t, and the leading edge was taken low at third slip. Cummins is fitter, more durable and more skilful than ever, and that doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon.
Speaking of bowlers who seem to get better with age…
———
NUMBER 4: JAMES ANDERSON (ENGLAND)
The shy Northern kid with the booming outswinger. The Loughborough project caught between actions. The maturing leader of the attack. The ageless, ever-improving physical freak, nagging at his worst and unplayable at his best. There’ve been quite a few iterations of James Anderson, and the current model is deservedly the most prolific Test seam bowler of all time.
As Andy Flower’s team blew itself to pieces in the 2013/14 Ashes, Anderson could easily have found himself hit by the shrapnel. He’d had a mediocre series, with his average, economy rate and strike rate all worse than even Shane Watson’s, including being smashed for 28 runs in one over by George Bailey at the WACA. Anderson could easily have gone the same way as Pietersen, Swann, Trott, Bresnan, Panesar, Tremlett, Carberry, Borthwick and Flower himself, and with 343 wickets at an average of 30.67 he would have gone with a record to be proud of. Not a great, but pretty damn good.
Instead, since that horror show, no bowler in the world has taken more wickets at a better average or economy rate. His average has dropped by 12%, his economy rate by 7%, and his strike rate by 5% - and all this since the age of 31. The mean retirement age for fast bowlers is 33.
The outswinger was there from the beginning. It’s what propelled him from Burnley CC to Lancashire to England in a year, and boy did it hoop, as Zimbabwe found to their cost when Anderson debuted in May 2003 at Lord’s:
But he was something of a rough diamond. His tendency to ‘go for a few’ is mentioned a few times on commentary in the above clip, and Anderson found out the hard way that pitching it way up in search of swing has its risks. His first 20 Tests were spread over 4 years, and while he took plenty of wickets, he was averaging a shade under 40 and going at 3.74 runs an over. Unlike Duncan Fletcher’s preferred four of Matthew Hoggard, Steve Harmison, Andrew Flintoff and Simon Jones, he simply could not be relied upon.
A failed attempt to break his idiosyncratic action down and rebuild it didn’t help. Many ECB coaches tried to correct his tendency to twist violently upon delivery, so much so that he was looking through his own legs at mid-off at the point of release. But after years of frustration and false starts, in 2007/08 Anderson switched back to his old action, and it worked almost immediately.
England tired of the diminishing returns of the ‘05 attack after a thumping defeat to New Zealand at Hamilton in March 2008. For the 2nd Test at Wellington’s Basin Reserve, Anderson and Stuart Broad were called in for Harmison and Hoggard, and while they wouldn’t actually begin their new ball partnership till later that year in India, there was already a sense that this was a turning over of the page. Anderson’s new old action gave him greater control with no loss of venom (not least because his head was at least looking somewhat in front of his own feet), and at the 14th attempt he took his first 5-for outside of England, taking out all of New Zealand’s top 5:
Up until 2008, Anderson had never made into double figures for Tests played in a calendar year. From 2008 on, he’s only failed to do so three times, and in two of those cases that’s because England didn’t actually play 10 Tests. He may have debuted five years earlier, but 2008 was when he truly arrived in Test cricket.
When New Zealand made the reciprocal tour that summer, Anderson again came to the fore, taking a then career-best 7/43 at Trent Bridge, and showcasing for the first time a new weapon. The top 5 all fell once more to the outswinger, but let’s pick up at the wickets of Jacob Oram and Gareth Hopkins. We can excuse Hopkins his wild swing on the grounds that he was batting with Chris Martin, but both he and Oram are dismissed by balls moving ‘the other way’:
At first glance it might appear like the ball hasn’t done much, or that they’re simply stock balls that didn’t swing. But a closer look reveals Anderson knows exactly where he wants the ball to go. He goes round the wicket to condition the left-handed Oram to the ball coming towards him before moving it away, and beats the right-handed Hopkins on the inside edge, and in doing so demonstrates a growing knowledge of his art.
The clear slant of the seam to the right - exaggeratedly so in the Oram ball to overcome the round-the-wicket angle into him - was something many had thought Anderson’s action wouldn’t allow him to do. After all, his whole body seems to curve away from the right-hander. But he wasn’t a raw kid anymore - he had been broken down, had rebuilt himself, and had come back stronger and more skilful than ever before.
And that improvement has gone on, and on, and on. 2008 was the time Anderson averaged under 30 in a calendar year. Since then, he’s only gone over 30 twice, has been under 25 8 times (including the last 6 in a row), and in 2017, the year he became only the 3rd fast bowler to pass 500 Test wickets, he averaged a ludicrous 17.58 from 11 Tests. And from 2008-2018, he has only once ended a calendar year with an average higher than he started with (and that too by 0.22 of a run).
Anderson’s away performances had never quite matched those in home conditions as Andy Flower’s England faced the winters that would define them: an Ashes Down Under in 2010/11, and a 2012 tour to India, where they hadn’t won in 27 years. Where his previous visits had found his early lack of nous exposed, his now near-mastery of all the skills that make a great seam bowler helped England to two of their very greatest series victories. Anderson tended to save his best for the opposition’s key players, and they didn’t come much more key in these unsettled teams than Ricky Ponting (outswinger) and Sachin Tendulkar (inswinger and off-cutter), still dangerous even in the twilight of their illustrious careers.
And in the successful defence of the Ashes in 2013, the summer before the Apocamitch, Anderson produced the very apotheosis of an outswinger to leave Australian captain Michael Clarke dumbfounded. Nobody in the world had scored more Test runs, more Test hundreds or Test double hundreds than Clarke since the loss of the urn in 2010/11, and only two players who’d played 10 or more Tests had a better average. To describe Clarke as a key wicket would be a gross understatement. And in their first clash of the series, Anderson did this to him:
But such is the perverse nature of Test cricket that perhaps the outstanding spell of Anderson’s long career was one where he didn’t get his man. He’d tortured Virat Kohli in 2014, dismissing him 4 times caught by keeper or slip to balls well wide of off-stump, and when India returned in 2018 with Kohli at the helm, the pre-series build-up was all about Kohli’s self-confessed change of technique and whether it would help the world’s no.1 non-banned Test batter overcome the man who would end the series as the most prolific fast bowler in Test history.
It did, spectacularly, but it took everything he had. We’ll end our run through Anderson’s long road to seam position mastery with a supercut that some sainted genius made of every ball bowled by him to Kohli in that first innings at Edgbaston. Stop everything. Have all your calls re-directed. Light a delicately scented candle. Revel in 5 minutes and 57 seconds of two competing geniuses at their very, very best.
Anderson is the last of the true swing bowlers on our list. Taking the bronze medal is a tall, rangy, deadly accurate Australian who played as big a part as anyone in Australia breaking their 18 year losing streak in England…
———
NUMBER 3: JOSH HAZLEWOOD (AUSTRALIA)
On the eve of his 50th Test, the beanpole from Bendemeer gave a refreshingly honest interview to ESPNCricinfo. ‘Refreshingly honest’ on this occasion didn’t mean publicly slagging off an opponent, or renewing an old feud, but stating in no uncertain terms just how technically, physically and mentally difficult the business of bowling fast in a Test match is. But when Josh Hazlewood’s at his best, as he was in the most recent Ashes, he makes it look…not easy exactly, but uncomplicated.
There are no flourishes. There’s no great wind-up and sling like Mitchells Johnson or Starc, no bounding leap like Dennis Lillee, no chainsaw celebration like Brett Lee. There isn’t even the perma-grimace even in victory of Peter Siddle. There is just rhythm, and accuracy, and control.
It isn’t just the height that makes one think of Glenn McGrath. Hazlewood’s action is utterly, almost mesmerically repeatable in its simplicity. But McGrath at 28 was still charging in hard, as Mark Ramprakash can testify - Hazlewood skipped tearaway entirely and skipped straight to metronome:
Such is his consistency that Hazlewood’s average has only been above 27 after 4 of his 51 Tests - to put that into some context, the great Dale Steyn took 13 Tests and almost 3 years to get his under that mark.
Despite his height and increasingly strong build, he’s not a bang-it-in bouncer merchant. Nor is he a searing hooping swing bowler. So how does he do it? The answer, in a word, is wobble. Hazlewood’s almost delicate release of the ball off the first finger means that while the seam is upright, the seam wobbles slightly as the ball approaches the batter, thus affording Hazlewood introducing small variations in swing, seam and pace with no change of action or loss of accuracy. Like a great spin bowler, he can thus bowl an over where all six balls pitch in the same place, but get there in slightly different ways.
What does this mean for the unlucky batter? It means they can never relax. Let’s go back through recent history and pick out some of Hazlewood’s seam at its deceptive, wobbly best. First, this, to Jason Roy at Headingley this summer:
Next, this example of devilish late curl away from the right-hander (namely, Joe Denly) at Lord’s in the previous Test of that series:
Exhibit C is from Adelaide, and the first Test against India in late 2018, where the slo-mo cameras picks out the delicious wobble on the dismissal of KL Rahul:
And, by way of a closing argument, this beauty late on day 1 at a sweltering SCG at the start of 2018 to remove Jonny Bairstow:
Hazlewood was rather gangling when he burst, limbs flailing, onto the international stage. But now, at 28 years old and with 51 Test under his belt, he looks entirely comfortable in his own action and wastes not a calorie of energy. Neither, despite being a true tearaway, does the man who pips him for the silver medal place in our list…
———
NUMBER 2: JOFRA ARCHER (ENGLAND)
This is not about how Jofra Archer found his way into England reckoning. It is a celebration of what he’s done since he got there - and what he’s done has been extraordinary.
What’s extraordinary is not the numbers - they’re good, but not ridiculous, and again it’s only from six Test. Nor is it the pace - yes, Archer is seriously fast, and it’s a thing of beauty watching him generate that pace from so rhythmical and easy and short a run-up, but he doesn’t bowl every single ball above 95mph (nor, while we’re at it, is it a crisis if he doesn’t). What’s extraordinary is his skill - in other words, how good he is.
Watching Jofra Archer makes much more sense when you learn that, by his own admission, he is relatively new to bowling quite this fast. He hasn’t grown up being able to simply blast batters away, so he had to learn how to get them out. And he has a lot of ways of getting them out.
He has seam movement and bounce from a length - witness Tim Paine having nowhere to go except the Lord’s Pavilion:
There’s swing, both ways - away from David Warner and into Usman Khawaja, from the second innings of that Lord’s Test where Archer debuted so thrillingly:
There’s really big swing, such as this booming inswinger at the Oval to force a rare mistake from Marnus Labuschagne, who is nearly as good as Steve Smith at clipping balls on the stumps through midwicket. But Archer bowls from so close to wicket and has such an immaculate release that, like a spinner getting drift, the ball threatens to curve away from Labuschagne, dragging his head over to off-stump before the movement back into him completes the job:
And there’s the knuckleball, the slower ball that more than any other relies on the seam presentation being identical to the full pace delivery. And Archer’s very much is - witness this to Nathan Lyon, also at the Oval, to seal Archer’s second Test five-for:
The final item on the agenda of this meeting of the Archer Appreciation Society is what is perhaps his most important Test wicket to date. In the first innings at Headingley, David Warner had, for once, survived Stuart Broad, and had the impressive Labuschagne for company, but with Steve Smith out with concussion, England had an untested middle order ahead of them if only they could remove Warner, who had scored 31 off his last 39 balls and was looking ominous. Archer made him duck a bouncer, beat his outside edge, then did this:
Jofra Archer is a special talent, and if he can be protected from the twin evils of those who moan every time he drops below 90mph and those who moan every time he bowls a spell longer than five overs, we have years of fun ahead of us with him. Lucky, lucky us.
RECAP
We’ve counted down 10 through 2. Well done us. And well done you discerning cricket lover you for indulging your cricket nerdy through it all. Before we reveal who tops our list of the bowlers with the best seam positions in men’s Test cricket, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves of the elite company in which said list-topper finds himself:
10. Kemar Roach (West Indies)
9. Tim Southee (New Zealand)
8. Mohammad Abbas (Pakistan)
7. Vernon Philander (South Africa)
6. Jasprit Bumrah (India)
5. Pat Cummins (Australia)
4. James Anderson (England)
3. Josh Hazlewood (Australia)
2. Jofra Archer (England)
The only man gifted enough, skilled enough and practiced enough to top such a mighty list is...
———
NUMBER 1: MOHAMMED SHAMI (INDIA)
This very exercise was prompted by a remark from India’s bowling coach Bharat Arun. And, upon careful review of the evidence and consideration of the competition, in a time when fast bowling depth around the world is perhaps as strong as its ever been, Arun was right - no fast bowler sends a seam down as well as Mohammed Shami.
Fast bowlers of Shami’s type - shorter, skiddy, bustling rather than gliding - usually rely on awkward angles and a sort of bristling hostility. Think Roach who came in at 10th on our list, or Neil Wagner, or going back a generation or two Darren Gough. But Shami is different - he is certainly fast, can bowl a sharp bouncer when the need arises, and bowls as they say ‘a heavy ball’, but it’s his phenomenal technical level that makes him stand out.
His potency - since the start of 2017, only Kagiso Rabada has more wickets at a better strike rate and only Ravindra Jadeja has more wickets in fewer innings - is built on the fact that he delivers the ball with wrist braced behind the ball, and fingers just a hair wider apart than most, gripping the seam between them so it cannot deviate from the vertical.
Shami’s seam position is so good that even at the very moment the ball pitches the seam is still upright, as in this literal stump-shatterer to Alastair Cook in Visakhapatnam in 2016:
So that’s movement into the left-hander covered - sharp enough and quick enough to get the greatest Test opener of the modern era in a tangle. Shami’s seam position also allows him to swing the ball away from the left-hander, as with this at Adelaide to remove Travis Head, the final obstacle to India getting what turned out to be a vital first-innings lead:
Shami’s got the goods to the right-handers too. Temba Bavuma and Faf du Plessis found that out in no uncertain terms as they became part of yet another second-innings five-for for Shami, this one in Vizag a few months ago:
I want to leave you on that final image for a reason. Shami’s seam position is so good that even the seam is perfect even as the ball is about to hit the stumps. It doesn’t get any better - step up to top of the podium, Mohammed Shami, and wear that gold with pride.
———
Thanks for reading the run-down, folks! Do you agree? Is there anyone who shouldn’t be on the list, or anyone you think should be who we haven’t covered? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter, and subscribe to the blog to be the first to know when I publish new stuff!