White-ball cricket's sucker punch

It has almost been drilled into us. Over and over again. If you have watched enough cricket, you would have heard Sunil Gavaskar talking about West Indies and fast bowling.

- Ashish Magotra

And once the conversation turns in that direction, the great India opener invariably brings up Andy Roberts. "I think Andy is the finest fast bowler I have ever faced," he once said. And given that he faced a lot of genuine fast bowling, that isn't a compliment to be taken lightly. The reason the West Indies stalwart was rated so highly was simple: he was intelligent. Always thinking, evolving, and it didn't matter if you were past 100, you always had to be watchful against him.

One of Roberts's favourite party tricks was his bouncer - a two-paced weapon of deception that almost no one could ever quite call. Some would call it a slower bouncer but the pace legend himself revealed that it wasn't the slower one that did the damage, rather it was the quicker one that followed.

The slower bouncer, bowled at around 85mph, would lull the batter into thinking that they could easily play the pull or hook against it. And just when it looked like they had found their comfort zone, Roberts would unleash a quicker bouncer around 90mph or more and get the wicket.

At the end of the day, batting is all about timing. Get your bat down to meet the ball at the right time and the ball will speed off in the desired direction. Get it wrong and it will go nowhere; worse still, you could get dismissed. Roberts' change of pace would rob the batters of timing, and often that is all that was needed.