The celebrated hero after Pakistan's opening ODI against Australia may have been Shahid Afridi, but Saeed Ajmal was the bowler who made the professionals sit up and take notice. By unleashing an unplayable doosra - a spinning variation in which an off-break unexpectedly leaves the batsman instead of coming in - he left Australians shaking their heads and sent a chill down the spine of future opposition.
Variation is the essence of success in spin, and it is created through turn - the phenomenon whereby the ball changes direction after spinning. But turn can be predictable. An off-spinner typically turns the ball into the right-handed batsman while a leg-spinner turns it away. Some element of surprise can be created by letting the ball go straight (as in a top-spinner), but it is unexpected turn in the opposite direction that really proves deadly.
Sometime in the 1890s, a leg-spinning variation appeared in which a right arm leg-break bowler could make the ball turn unexpectedly into the right-handed batsman without any visible change in bowling action. The discovery is credited to B.J.T. Bosanquet, an English spinner who perfected the delivery and used it with success in Test matches. Over the years, this variation has been referred to as the 'Bosie', the 'wrong-un', and - the name that has stuck - the 'googly.' It's been a key bowling asset and almost all great leg-spinners have used it to destructive effect.
The doosra is a far more recent invention. Its discovery is widely credited to Pakistan's off-spinning champion Saqlain Mushtaq, who developed it in the late 1990s and used it cleverly in the latter half of his career. With this memorable contribution Saqlain revived the future of off-spin bowling, which had otherwise become predictable and stale. Following Saqlain, the likes of Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan and India's Harbhajan Singh have also employed the doosra. Indeed, mastery of the doosra is fast becoming a requirement for an off-spinner to survive in top-level competition.
The best way to understand the doosra is to think of it as an off-spinner's googly. The batsman expects the ball to turn in, but it spins away, taking the edge or forcing a false stroke. Bowled on the right line, a doosra can even beat the bat to shatter the stumps.
Both the doosra and the googly are easily disguised because the direction of rotation on the ball is the same as for the standard off-break or leg-break. This is not as confusing as it sounds. A leg-break, for example, is bowled by rotating the ball counter-clockwise (from the bowler's perspective), and a googly is also bowled by imparting rotation in the same direction. What makes the googly turn in the opposite direction is that the arm is twisted at the time of delivery so that the palm faces away from the batsman while the ball emerges out of the back of the hand.
The doosra is bowled as a mirror-image of this technique. For a regular off-break, the ball is held with the palm facing towards the batsman and the direction of rotation is clockwise (from the bowler's perspective). In bowling a doosra, the bowler twists his arm at the time of delivery so that the palm faces away from the batsman and the ball emerges out of the back of the hand. The spin on the ball is still clockwise, but because the ball has been turned nearly 180 degrees along the vertical axis, when it pitches it turns away instead of coming in.
Compared with the googly, the doosra is a much harder delivery to bowl. While anybody can send down a doosra with a bent elbow, a doosra delivered legally requires that the elbow be hyper-extended. Most people do not have hyper-extensible elbow joints, so it is hardly a surprise that whenever some new bowler unveils a doosra, the legality of their bowling action is questioned, as Saeed Ajmal's has been. Nevertheless, if he is found to have a hyper-extensible elbow joint, he will have no problem in getting cleared.
The origin of the term 'googly' is obscure, but the word doosra - a familiar Urdu term - is known to everyone in South Asia. It is translated into English as 'the second one' or 'the other one'. Moin Khan, a famously loud encourager of spinners, used to call on Saqlain to bowl the doosra when keeping wickets to him. Soon, television commentators caught on to it, and Tony Greig solemnised it in an interview with Saqlain. It is ironic that Moin was using Urdu to keep opponents from understanding it, and now the whole cricket world understands exactly what this Urdu word means. It's an apt term, symbolising the invention's Pakistani origin.
The power of the doosra can be read in the faces of Australian batsmen in Dubai, who wore baffled expressions as they misread Saeed Ajmal. After the first ODI, the Sydney Morning Herald commented that Ajmal's spin variations were delivered in a language 'unintelligible to the Australians.' Ajmal hadn't used the doosra in his short career prior to the series against Australia. Now this 31-year-old off-spinner from Pakistan has armed himself with a destructive new weapon. These are warning signs for the world's batsmen.
