The doosra faded and off spin got better for it

Tighter scrutiny of bowling actions removed a glamour delivery, and what replaced it has been more effective than anyone expected.

For about a decade, every young off spinner in every academy wanted to bowl the one that went the other way. Coaches were asked for it constantly. Parents asked for it. It was the delivery that made a finger spinner interesting, and the assumption was that without it a right-arm off spinner would be found out by good left-handers and by anyone willing to sweep.

Then the scrutiny of actions tightened, the tolerance for elbow extension was enforced with cameras rather than eyesight, and a great many of those deliveries quietly disappeared from the game.

What happened next was not the collapse everyone predicted. Off spin got better. Not because the doosra was worthless, but because its absence forced bowlers back onto the things that actually take wickets in the longer run, and those things are dull to describe and hard to master: overspin, the angle created by going wide or close to the stumps, and above all the willingness to give the ball air.

Flight is the underrated weapon here and it is a strange one, because it involves doing the thing every instinct says not to do. Tossing the ball higher gives the batter more time to see it, which sounds like a gift, and it is, except that a higher trajectory means a steeper descent, more drop late in the flight, and a bigger error if the batter misjudges the length by a foot. The bowler is trading a small increase in the chance of being hit for a large increase in the chance of a mistake. Slow bowlers who never make that trade end up as containment bowlers who go at four an over and take nothing.

The economy obsession is what kills it. A spinner judged on runs per over will flatten their trajectory, fire it in at the pads, and become safe and harmless. A spinner judged on wickets will keep buying, and will occasionally be taken for sixteen in an over in front of a crowd that thinks they are bowling badly.

I want captains to protect that bowler rather than move them to the boundary end after one bad over.

The doosra was a shortcut around a hard skill. The hard skill was always the one worth having, and it took a rule change to make anyone practise it.