Irish bowlers show their skills on chaotic day one
Seamers show a remarkable ability to move the ball both ways given their lack of recent red ball cricket
Stumps, day one: Ireland (100-4) (Curtis Campher 49; Zia-ur-Rehman 2-13) trail Afghanistan (155 all out) (Ibrahim Zadran 53; Mark Adair 5-39) by 55 runs.
Be honest. Were you surprised by how good the Irish seamers were with the moving ball?
I was.
Mark Adair takes the headlines - deservedly so - with a maiden Test five-for. Sadly, given the Tolerance Oval has no honours board, the Holywood man’s achievement will not be immortalised in the way that it should.
(If you missed it, this Test match was bumped at the last minute from the main ground in Abu Dhabi to a smaller one due to a clash with a very large school sports day).
Given the name, Tolerance Oval, you’d wonder what the people of Abu Dhabi used to be so intolerant of that they needed a cricket stadium to remind them of their newfound magnanimity. I digress.
Chapeau Mr Adair. Craig Young (2-31) deserves plaudits too, as do Barry McCarthy (1-28) and Curtis Campher (2-13) to slightly lesser extents. Ireland’s bowling display was not perfect, but to bowl out a side for 155 after eight months of no red ball matches is an impressive feat. Afghanistan played a Test against Sri Lanka earlier this month.
Adair’s performance caught me on the hoof. Young’s did not.
Adair has a stellar record taking wickets with the new ball in T20 cricket, extracting whatever movement he can before the white Kookabura ceases to help bowlers after about four deliveries.
Yet in 50-over cricket, where a new ball at each end should, in theory, allow for movement longer into the game, Adair has been so-so of late. In Zimbabwe, he took no wickets with the new ball, albeit he didn’t have to with Josh Little doing all the heavy lifting. Against England in September, when the ball didn’t offer anything, he and Little were taken to the cleaners.
Fast forward to today and Adair swinging the red ball around corners in both directions, while also finding lateral movement off the surface was a surprise. Perhaps this is unfair. Some will argue comparing white ball movement to red ball is a fool’s exercise. The two aren’t completely unrelated, though. How you swing a ball doesn’t change depending on the colour.
Adair’s wicket flurry started when he changed the game in the seventh over. He was extracting plenty of movement before then, swinging the ball past the right-hander’s outside edge. He also threw in the odd in-swinger, Andy Balbirnie taking an unsuccessful review when the ball did too much on one appeal.
Yet after six overs of toil, Adair finally induced Noor Ali Zadran into nicking to the skipper at second slip. It was the classic red ball dismissal, in many ways. Start it straight, get the batter attempt a drive down the ground, move it away from him late to take the edge.
Three balls later, Afghanistan’s trump card Rahmat Shah was also gone. His departure was the other quintessential fast bowler’s dismissal. Despite Adair previously showing he could move the ball back in while it was in the air, this delivery was an attempted out-swinger. As all fast bowlers know, sometimes you get the benefit of natural variation, the away movement opening up a gap between bat and pad before the ball jags sharply back in off the surface. ‘Through the gate’, as they say.
Adair’s release for his out-swinger can be seen below, the seam of the ball pointing towards the slip cordon.
The release of the ball nipping back off the surface, shown below, isn’t altogether that different. The seam isn’t pointing as prominently towards the cordon, but it’s still in that vague direction. The shiny side of the ball is clearly facing the batter, showing Adair was likely trying to bowl an out-swinger, only for the pitch to send it the opposite way.
Compare the above to the in-swinger below. Look how pronounced the seam position is in the opposite direction, back towards the batter. This is quite a clear, deliberate in-ducker.
Adair’s remaining dismissals were as follows: Rahmanullah Gurbaz nicked a rank short, wide delivery, arguably the worst ball of the spell; Zia-ur Rehman nicked a delivery that angled in and nipped away - the opposite of the nip-backer through the gate; left-hander Zahir Kahn saw his off-stump castled by one that came back in.
If that Adair display was a pleasant surprise, Young’s handful of wickets were anything but. His spell started a touch loosely, but his recovery displayed skills we have seen before in white ball cricket.
In September against England, Young wrested momentum back Ireland’s way after the opening bowlers got pummelled. In Bristol, he dismissed Will Jacks with a beautiful set-up. Using the same release, ball one nipped away, taking the outside edge and flying to the boundary. Ball two pitched in the same spot but nipped the other way, castling into Jacks’ stumps.
Young nipped one through the gate again for his dismissal of Nasir Jamal on Wednesday, only via a different method. Adair’s nip-back delivery had a straight seam. Young used the famous wobble ball, firing down a scrambled seam that jagged viciously upon pitching. The wobble ball is devastating in red ball cricket, Wisden writing an excellent piece here on how it has revolutionised Test matches. Stuart Broad mastered the art before he retired.
The thinking behind it, essentially, is if the ball lands on a certain side it moves laterally towards the batter. If the ball is wobbling in the air thanks to the scrambled seam, sometimes it will land on one side and jag in, others it will skip on straight as normal. The bowler doesn’t know because he’s scrambled the seam. If he doesn’t know, neither does the batter. You only need the ball to catch the right side once for it to nip through the gate. Game over.
All told, including McCarthy’s out-swing and Campher’s ability to come in and help get rid of the tail - even if the extra pace of Little could have helped speed up that process - the skill of Ireland’s seamers impressed more than expected given the lack of recent red ball cricket. The fast bowling group recently went on a training camp to Spain, no doubt to work on extracting movement from grass surfaces.
Bowling coach Ryan Eagleson and analyst Scott Irvine also deserve credit. When the squad was being picked, Irvine would have presented data that suggested Abu Dhabi is a venue more conducive to seam bowling than other sub-continent pitches. Ireland only picked two frontline spinners in their squad, as a result.
The late switch to the nearby Tolerance Oval could well have thrown those plans out of whack. Luck appears to have been on Ireland’s side with conditions still favouring seam.
Ireland struggled to compete on their return to Test cricket last year. Wednesday’s display is the closest they have come to laying a platform for their first Test win since Tim Murtagh’s spell at Lord’s.
These days don’t come very often. There is only one adequate response to the display of Ireland’s bowlers, Adair in particular: build that man an honours board.