The Fast Bowler Tyson
BY JOHN ARLOTT * CRICKET, perhaps from its very nature, has produced relatively few players who have been what Hollywood calls 'box office.' W. G. Grace was, because he was an Eminent Victorian, a figure whose importance extended be- yond the field of sport to the social life of his time. Sir Donald Bradman and, in a less publicity-conscious age, Sir J. B. Hobbs, must rank with Grace as institutions --- with their knighthoods to indicate as much — but it should also be remembered that they broke records by attractive cricket.
The major 'draw' in the game today, attracting the non- cricketing curious and spectacle-seekers, is Frank Tyson, the Northamptonshire fast bowler. His Test Match partner, Statham, a bowler of similar method, and whom experts reckon his equal by technical standards, lacks such sensational appeal. We may note, too, that Tyson himself has painstakingly , avoided extraneous personal publicity.
The cardinal factor of this appeal is , expressed, in 'shop' terms, as the 'extra yard' of pace. Simply, the fact spectators recognise is that Tyson is a 'pure' fast bowler. That is to say, without appreciable assistance from the pitch, or the employ- ment of swing or spin, he can defeat accomplished batsmen by the sheer speed at which he propels the ball. .
Tyson falls into the particularly modern pattern of the sportsman who, by taking thought, has added a cubit to his athletic stature. Like Roger Bannister, the runner, he has applied an academically trained brain to sport : he took a degree course in the arts at Durham University on scholar- ships. Beginning from the basic principles of bowling, he analysed his physical assets and exploited them to maximum effect.
By the standards of statistics, he is young in the game : he has taken a bare two hundred wickets in his entire career as a first-class cricketer. Yet, before and during his successes of the past twelve months he has constantly altered and developed his run-up and action. Physically unremarkable and well pro- portioned, he is sufficiently above average height to mask to some extent his considerable width of shoulders and depth of chest.
Between deliveries, he slouches back to his mark somewhat flat-footedly, head down : arms hanging, boa), drooping, in such complete relaxation as marks the good boxer resting his entire body between rounds. There is, too, the probability that Tyson has consciously trained himself to the ultimate elimina- tion of tension by severing himself mentally, also, from his bowling at this time.
Once turned at his mark, the spectator's eye can watch the process of tautening, implicit in the hardening of his face, the straightening of the body, as he scrabbles his spikes on the ground in a series of tiny steps which suggest a charging with nervous electricity. Then comes a run-in which accelerates as the strides lengthen into a series of leg-stretching leaps of an excitingly eager hostility. His body rocks back and, at the moment of delivery, swings forward arid round, in a rhythmic wrench which sends the ball down the pitth at a pace beyond the experience—and faster than the normal reflexes—of any batsman in the world today who has not taken practice against Tyson himself. His follow-through takes him away to, the off side, where he checks in an attitude of belligerence not nor- mally to be distinguished in this quiet, thoughtfully bookish young man.
Technically speaking, he constantly endeavours to bowl— and frequently does bowl—the, body-action break-back of the classical fast bowler, and he is steadily developing the full half-volley which, when it is effective, is called a 'yorker.' Every batsman against whom' he bowls, however, is consistently beaten—if not dismissed—by the sheer pace of the ball.
It is as if he had a separate, fast-bowling self which canalis6 all the aggression in his make-up into the action of bowling fast. In that act he undoubtedly finds satisfaction. The mind which relishes its effect must also recognise that the effective life of a fast bowler is short. If his body did not constantly tell him that such crescendos of energy cannot long be maintained, he has the history of cricket to remind him that the great fast bowlers—Larwood, Richardson, Kortright, Jones, Cotter— had lost their peak speed before they were thirty.
Many forms of sporting performance may be largely con- trived out of good physique, application and practice. True fast bowling may not: it demands a rare, inborn synchronisation of studied muscular effort. It demands, moreover, youth and strength, and the psychological urge to burn them up in the short-lived, but heady, glory of man-made pace beyond the power or timing of other men. That.prodigality underlies and underlines the currently popular spectacle of 'Going up to the cricket to watch Tyson.'
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