The scrambled seam deserves more respect than it gets

Coaching obsesses over an upright seam, and yet the delivery that does nothing predictable is often the one that takes the wicket.

Every young quick is taught the same picture. Two fingers either side of the seam, wrist behind the ball, seam upright and canted slightly towards slip, and the ball leaves the hand spinning backwards along that seam like a wheel. It is a beautiful thing when it works, and it is what produces genuine seam movement off the pitch, because the ball lands on the raised stitching and deviates.

The problem is that it deviates predictably enough for a good batter to play the line and trust the deviation is small. Against a bowler with an immaculate seam, a batter who plays late and straight is quite safe most of the time, because he knows the ball will move a certain amount in one of two directions and his bat is in the corridor for both.

Now take the same ball and release it with the seam rotating end over end at a slight angle, wobbling. Nobody, including the bowler, knows which part of the ball will strike the pitch. It might land on the seam and jag. It might land on leather and skid straight. That uncertainty is transferred entirely to the batter, who cannot play the line with confidence because there is no line, only a distribution.

Cricket has come round to this in the last decade and the wobble seam is now standard equipment. What has not changed is how it is coached to teenagers, where seam presentation is still treated as a moral question and a scrambled ball is a mistake to be drilled out.

I would put it the other way. Teach the upright seam because you need the control it brings, and then teach the wobble as a weapon rather than an accident, and be explicit that the second one is not a lesser version of the first.

There is a real caveat. The wobble works best when the ball is hard and new and the surface offers something. On a flat pitch in the fortieth over it is just a slower ball with less control, and a batter with a good eye will hit through the line and be right to.

And there is a nice irony in it. The most sophisticated delivery in modern fast bowling is the one that most closely resembles what a child does when nobody has taught them anything.