Stephen Harmison says he’d forgotten how to bowl a slower ball before castling Michael Clarke with one of the most famous pace-off deliveries in cricket history, on the third evening of the Edgbaston Test in the 2005 Ashes.

The deceptive delivery was described by Mark Nicholas on Channel 4 commentary as “one of the great balls” and also a “staggering gamble”, with the latter assessment more true of slower balls bowled by Harmsion than other quicks. The England seamer had an up-and-down relationship with the variation, as he explained on a Sky Sports Watchalong of the Edgbaston finale.

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“I’d forgotten how to do it! At the top of my bowling action it was like, ‘Oh what am I going to do next?’,” he said. “I did that quite a bit. Normally when I bowled a [slower ball with a] white one I tended to turn around very very quickly because it went over my head.”

Harimson recounted an anecdote involving MS Dhoni where his attempts to second-guess the India wicketkeeper came unstuck. “I remember a few years later, we played India in a one-day game and I bowled it and thought ‘I’ve got Dhoni with that one’ and he hit it for six,” he said. “Fred [Andrew Flintoff] was captaining and he said ‘what are you going to do now? Yorker?’ and I said ‘Nah I’m going to do it again’, and he hit it even further. And Fred said, ‘What are you going to do now?’ and I said, ‘He can’t think I’m going to bowl three slower balls in a row’, so I thought I’m going to do it again and he hit it even further.”

Harmison’s decision to bowl a slower ball to Clarke was an attempt to fool him, motivated by the heat the Australian was receiving from other parties. “It wasn’t the greatest of slower balls – it was a shocking slower ball to be fair – but it worked that day,” said Harmison. “To be fair, I think when you watch it again, one of the reasons I bowled it was Freddie had a go at Michael Clarke, he verbally had a go at him, went hard at him, and the three balls previous where about 90 mile an hour, aggressive. So that made my mind up, try something different, and it worked.”