shane Warne to Mike Gatting, Old Trafford, June 1993. The champion leggie’s first delivery in Tests on English soil, to an excellent player of spin.
A ripping leg-break that drifted into the right-hander, pitched outside leg, broke sharply, turned right across the face of Gatting’s bat and crashed into the off-stump.
In that moment itself, that ball—‘the ball of the century’—fired the imagination like no other. Over time, it developed a legacy of its own.
India’s Jasprit Bumrah celebrates the wicket of England’s James Anderson on Saturday. Pic/AFP
Stunning yorker
Jasprit Bumrah to Ollie Pope, Visakhapatnam, February 2024. A laser-driven, pinpoint accurate reverse-swinging screamer of a yorker which started well outside off, surged through the air like a missile, forced thebatsman to get his feet out of the way in self-protection and plucked out the middle and leg stumps.
A magical ball, delivered by a magical bowler. Stumps spreadeagled, the batsman in a daze, the bowler ecstatic, his mates beside themselves with joy. That delivery has already developed its own legacy.