The arm ball does more work than the big turner

Off-spinners get judged on how far it spins, which is why so many of them bowl badly.

A young off-spinner will be told, roughly a thousand times before he is twenty, that he needs to spin it hard. Rip it. Give it a real tweak. Nobody ever tells him that most of his wickets will come from the ball that goes straight on, and that the reason it works is entirely dependent on the ball that does not.

The arm ball has an image problem. It sounds like an absence, a delivery defined by what it fails to do. In practice it is the harder ball to bowl well, because it has to leave the hand looking exactly like the one before it and then decline to turn. Anything visible in the wrist or the seam and a decent player picks it and plays down the line.

What actually happens is a batter who has committed to playing for spin that never arrives. He has opened the face a fraction, or planted his front foot outside the line trusting the ball to come back. The lbw and the outside edge both come from that, and neither appears in anybody's highlight package, because a ball that goes straight is not a beautiful thing to watch.

Here is where the coaching goes wrong. If you judge a spinner on degrees of turn, he will try to produce degrees of turn, which means bowling slower and giving it more air and losing the thing that makes the straight one dangerous. The two deliveries have to come out at similar pace from a similar height or the contrast disappears. A big ripping off-break at seventy eight kilometres an hour and an arm ball at eighty five are two different bowlers, and any competent batter is watching for exactly that.

I would go further and say the ratio matters more than either ball. Bowl the straight one too rarely and it is a novelty nobody has to respect. Bowl it too often and you are a medium pacer with a funny action. The good ones sit somewhere around one in five and vary it by batter, which is a decision, not a skill.

None of this is new. It is just unfashionable, because turn photographs well and subtlety does not.