Speed thrills: from Donald to Archer, why pace is a spectacle like no other

In a modern game peppered with sixes and slanted towards batters, we need the raw beauty of fast bowling more than ever

The ball comes out of his hand at the end of that liquid smooth action. Lissom yet muscular limbs working in unison, it’s so easy on the eye as to be almost laughable. The loping, easy run into the delivery stride, right hip almost knitted to stumps at the non-strikers end. High elbow and rapidly rotating shoulder passing the brim of the umpire’s fedora by barely a millimetre. The ball comes out of his hand at the end of that liquid smooth action and the crowd and the batter hold their breath.

“It was exciting, there was an ‘ooh’ or an ‘aah’ every single over,” said Jofra Archer after his devastating spell of fast bowling reduced South Africa’s top order to rubble in the third one-day international in Southampton last week. England romped to a record 342-run victory in the dead rubber game, Archer finished with 4 for 18 in nine overs. At one point he had four wickets for the cost of five runs, but this was one of those spells of fast bowling where the numbers didn’t even seem to matter.

It’s often said but there is something special about seeing a fast bowler in full flight, at full tilt. Perhaps now more than ever, with bat increasingly dominating ball across the game, with batters peppering the stands and holding the pose, record totals being laid waste and even cherub-faced teenagers lacerating bowlers on the world stage. It is then an enjoyable recalibration to see perennially six-smiting batters “sat down”; even better to witness them hopping around the crease like someone in a beer garden who has accidentally stepped on a spaniel’s tail. Watch as the ball whistles past their nose, jags past the edge of the bat or flies so close to the stumps that it could whisper sweet nothings into the bail groove as it passes on its way to scorch the keeper’s gloves.

Archer’s spell whetted the appetite and gave pangs of nostalgia. Most England fans’ minds would have fast-forwarded a couple of months to Perth and the first Ashes Test in November. The thought of seeing Archer in Australia, back to his best after more than half a decade of debilitating injury and rehab, running amok through the Aussie batting card. It doesn’t just quicken the pulse, it makes it tachycardiac. Take that pure clean hit of his comeback Test wicket of Yashasvi Jaiswal at Lord’s this summer and supercharge it tenfold.

Others would also have been reminded of Archer’s spell to Steve Smith at Lord’s in the 2019 Ashes and one of the most visceral periods of fast bowling in recent memory. Long after both men have hung up their boots, that passage of play will be remembered. Most couldn’t tell you what Archer’s figures were in that game or what score Smith made, this was one of those spells that elevates and embeds above most others, leaving the numbers or even the end result of the game to mere admin.

Think a wild-eyed and zinc-lipped Allan Donald to a saucer-eyed Michael Atherton at Trent Bridge in 1998. Or, to keep the England v South Africa theme, Andrew Flintoff thundering in like a blond, bulldog-nosed locomotive to Jacques Kallis at Edgbaston 10 years later. The latter usually appeared to be made of granite but, in those few overs of assault from Flintoff, temporarily resembled something more like balsa.

That Flintoff spell left its mark on another young fast bowler and future great of the game. A 26-year-old Dale Steyn was on his first Test tour of England, a broken thumb suffered in the first Test at Lord’s meant he was an onlooker in Birmingham. “That’s one of my most vivid memories,” recalls Steyn. “The crowd were just crazy and I had never heard anything like it. They were roaring Flintoff to the crease and it all just felt epic. I wanted a piece of that when I bowled. That theatre and intensity. Seeing that was really special and for me is what Test cricket is all about.”

Most of us will never get close to anything like it, so it prompts the question – what does it feel like to be a fast bowler during one of those spells, when everything is on song, the ball is on a string and the batter may as well be in the palm of your hand? “It sort of clicks” was about as detailed as Ian Botham got when trying to explain the times he got on a hot streak.

“Absolutely amazing!” Fortunately, the former England fast bowler Devon Malcolm is less equivocal. “When you’re in good rhythm, everything is so easy. You run up, you’re following through. Everything feels right and there’s no strain on the body. It’s just flowing out. I mean, those times, it’s, you know, it’s just …”

Malcolm is momentarily lost in a moment of reverie. Maybe it is quite hard to describe this stuff after all.

“I will say this,” he adds after a second or two. “Those spells, those golden days, they make up for all the times when you wake up and can’t get out of bed, when everything aches. So you earn them in a way. All the catches are taken, all the LBs are given, the crowd is behind you and it feels like your moment in the sun.”

Steyn retired in 2021; a keen skater, surfer and fisher, he gets his kicks in other ways than fast bowling now. He has also just become a dad for the first time. His head hits the pillow weary but content every night, but there is one feeling he misses.

“It’s like a primal thing almost. You feel like you have this incredible power during those spells. You can feel the fear and the excitement and you know you are the reason for it.”

And then more specifically: “There’s this moment when the ball leaves your fingers, you can recognise it because it has left your hand so many times, I’m imagining it now … when the ball finishes leaving your middle finger at the very, very, last second, you feel your finger rub down the seam and it lets go, in your mind you know immediately that it’s a good ball, that it’s almost certain to be a wicket. That’s the feeling that I miss.”

Steyn the (almost) unmistakeable

Steyn’s stats speak for themselves and yet they don’t tell the whole story. Finishing his career with 699 international wickets including a South Africa record of 439 Test scalps at 22.95, he’s up there with the best to ever do it. On the pitch he radiated intensity, pint-sized as fast bowlers come but imposing in his own way; to witness him in the flesh was to truly appreciate his savage craft. Capable of swinging the ball late at more than 90mph, he would splatter stumps, destroy pads and deliver a furious style of chin music. Steyn often played with a fiercely glazed look in his eye and with his veins pumped past any sensible level of PSI. He celebrated his wickets viscerally too, like a man trying to punch a hole in the actual earth. Off the pitch, you guessed it, he’s a pussycat.

The Spin reminds him of the time he went unrecognised at a pop-up fast bowling clinic in downtown Manhattan during last year’s T20 World Cup, a clip that soon went viral. “That was so funny,” he says. “My wife was filming but she actually missed the best bit … as I got into the net I said to the guy: ‘What are we doing here boss?’ And he replied really seriously: ‘I’m gonna teach you how to bowl’ I decided to play along, I didn’t want to embarrass him, he seemed very committed so I wanted to be as sincere as I could. When we walked away and got round the corner my wife and I collapsed into fits of giggles.”

Quote of the week

I will walk nude around the MCG if he doesn’t make a hundred this summer!” – as if Joe Root wasn’t under enough pressure to score a first Ashes ton on Australian soil, the former Australia opening batter turned stetson-sporting commentator Matthew Hayden increased the stakes even higher when talking on the All Over Bar The Cricket YouTube channel.

Memory lane

Saturday 14 March 1981, Kensington Oval, Barbados. One of the most memorable overs in Test cricket history is about to take place. Somewhere near the sightscreen at the Pavilion End, Michael “Whispering Death” Holding prowls at the top of his mark. A 40-year-old Geoffrey Boycott prepares to face him on a wicket with a malevolent green tinge. After five balls of incredible theatre in front of a delirious crowd, Holding gets one through Boycott’s obdurate defences. Cue pandemonium.

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And Nick Dall reports on the former South Africa international Gary Kirsten’s initiative to bring township children into the game.

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… by writing to james.wallace.casual@theguardian.com.

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