The wobble-seam delivery, as it has become known, sits part way between mystery and mistake.

New-ball orthodoxy dictates that a fast bowler should deliver the ball with their fingers close together, and the seam pointed either at first slip or fine leg. The ball is then released rotating on its stitched axis, moving in the air in the direction towards which the seam is pointing.

The wobble-seam disregards this. Instead, the bowler parts their fingers, and holds the ball with the seam pointing straight down the wicket. The ball comes out with the seam oscillating between perhaps 11 and 1 o’clock. When it lands, it can dart in either direction, or go straight on. Bowlers say there is no way of controlling which, and batters confess that it is not possible to predict either.

The first whispers of the innovation came towards the end of the Noughties, when it was referred to as the ‘wobbler’ or the ‘wobble ball’. By now it is an accepted part of a pace bowler’s armoury. In some respects it is still considered just that: a variation, one weapon among many in a bowler’s arsenal once other options have been exhausted, or a tool saved for overseas tours when the standard tricks won’t cut it. Instead, it stands as perhaps the most significant innovation in fast bowling since reverse-swing, and has helped to redefine the contours of Test cricket.

***

In its early days, from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, the wobble-seam was the reserve of a select few: the naturals, the autodidacts, the visionaries, all ahead of the curve. These bowlers were, in general, unremarkable in terms of speed, and yet achieved instant, extraordinary feats with the ball. There was Australia’s Stuart Clark, who came into arguably the greatest Test side of all time in the mid-Noughties and was immediately one of its best bowlers, claiming the Player of the Series award in his first series, against South Africa, before finishing as the leading wicket-taker in a 5-0 Ashes drubbing in 2006/07. “Over time, it just came out of my hand a little bit differently,” Clark explains. “And it was like, ‘Well, this is actually working’”.

There was, too, Vernon Philander, who razed Australia for 47 on his debut and became the quickest to 50 Test wickets in more than a century. “By the time of my Test debut, I would have worked it out,” he says. “I wasn’t looking for swing at all. If you look at most of my dismissals, they pitched on around about fourth stumps and either jagged back at the stumps or it would go straight on or just nip a touch away. As a bowler you don’t know which way it’s going. So good luck to the batsman trying to guess.”

And then there was Alan Richardson, who never played Test cricket, but whose story might just be the most freakish of them all.

As the 2009 season drew to a close, Richardson’s life as a county cricketer was all but wound down. After 11 years on the circuit for Warwickshire and Middlesex, his thoughts had turned to life after cricket. He undertook a work experience stint at the Birmingham Evening Mail and spent time at a spread-betting company, while considering Middlesex’s offer of a player-coach position.

Instead, he opted to move to Worcestershire, figuring the contract offered him a better work-life balance. Richardson owned a house in Birmingham, while the woman he would go on to marry lived in Nottingham. His career had proved creditable but modest, with 314 wickets at just below 30 and one England Lions cap to his name. He was 34. And at this point, he became, essentially overnight, the most prolific bowler in the country.

Between 2010 and 2013, he claimed 254 County Championship wickets, the most of any bowler in the competition, at an average a shade over 22. In his first season for Worcestershire he claimed 55 wickets to spearhead a successful promotion push. In the second he claimed a staggering 73 scalps, the most in Division One, to keep his new side in the top tier. He was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in the 2012 Almanack, the first recipient of the award to be uncapped at international level in nearly 20 years. In the final two years of his career, his average dipped under 20, and he claimed nine five-wicket hauls – more than he had claimed in the entirety of his pre-Worcestershire efforts.

At his previous clubs, Richardson had had to battle for his place. He had been reluctant to move away from the in-swing he had bowled his whole life. At Worcestershire, he figured he had nothing to lose.

“By the end I’d literally just bowl wobble-seam,” says Richardson, now head coach at Worcestershire. “When I was young I got taught just to hold it as you would typically, fingers close together, and I did that for years. And essentially, my wrist was pretty rubbish. I bowled in-swing mainly and attacked the inside-edge of a right-handed batter. As I developed, changing my grip to be a little bit wider on the seam, canted towards first or second slip, suddenly I started to attack both edges, which just made me twice the bowler. It looked pretty ugly, I wasn’t bowling any quicker, but I could move the ball both ways, not really knowing which way it was going to go.”

Today the wobble-seam has permeated the game at all levels. In county cricket, the Duke’s ball on early- and late-season pitches create the perfect environment, in which the lower average speeds, according to Philander, are an asset rather than a hindrance.

“Bowlers worked out the most efficient way over a 10-15 year period of how to get top-order batters out, and that was certainly the wobble-seam,” says former Worcestershire opening batter Daryl Mitchell, who observed the evolution of the ball close at hand across a 17-year career.

“When I first started, basically everyone was trying to swing it away and then swing it back. You could leave probably the first 60, 70, 80 per cent of your deliveries, and get yourself in that way. That progressed to people generally trying to swing it away, and then instead of bowling an inswinger, bowling a scramble-seam, wobble-seam ball as a change-up. And then from there, it just seemed to evolve. Rather than coming as a change-up, it became a stock delivery.”

During Mitchell’s career, returns for openers dropped off dramatically. In 2009, the year before Richardson’s move to Worcester, openers across the County Championship averaged a combined 38.73. By 2018, that figure had dropped below 30, the first time it had done so since 2000.

This isn’t all down to wobble-seam – batters will talk about the calibre of surfaces, pundits will bemoan declining techniques, and the bowlers union will boast its own improving breadth and depth – but it isn’t a coincidence either. According to CricViz, seam movement is harder to play than swing. Against a ball that moves 1.5 degrees or more in the air, batters, overall, average 26.70. But against balls that move off the pitch at least 0.75 degrees, only half the threshold for swing, the average hovers around 20. It makes intuitive sense too.

“From swing bowling, you get an indication from the hand,” Mitchell explains. “If the shiny side is on one side and the rough side is on the other, or from the wrist position or as they release, some bowlers swing it pretty early. Whereas with wobble-seam bowling, if it’s pitching a couple of yards in front of you, you just haven’t got any time to react. If you don’t know which way it’s going to go then that makes it doubly difficult. It’s just reaction time.”

Once you begin to notice it, you’ll start to see it everywhere. Slow down any fast-bowling jaffa from the last five years, and there’s a good chance you’ll see the seam darting one way and then the other like the head of a snake, ready to snap and strike. Ben Stokes advances at Mohammad Abbas and then stands mouth agape, the ball having ripped past the outside edge and sent the bails flying. Aiden Markram leaves a sixth stump ball from Jasprit Bumrah alone, only to see it deck back in and hit off-stump. Trent Boult equals a record from 1902, the first bowler to clean-bowl an entire Test top three in an opening spell. Pat Cummins castles Joe Root at Old Trafford, the ball that decisively breaks England’s Ashes resistance. Flick the frames back and forth, and you’ll see the seam swaying on its way down.

Stuart Broad, the second most prolific Test quick of all time, now describes himself as a wobble-seam bowler. Anderson, the fast bowler ahead of him in the list, is more coy about divulging his secrets, but his bowling profile has changed markedly. In 2007, the first full year of his for which CricViz have data, he swung more than 60 per cent of his deliveries significantly. In 2017, that number had almost halved – but the percentage of balls deviating off the pitch had shot up by more than a third.

“Jimmy Anderson has probably got the best wrist in world cricket in terms of swinging the ball in and out,” says Mitchell. “Even he himself uses wobble-seam fairly regularly now.”

It’s not the case that every ball that moves off the pitch is because of the wobble-seam. Part of the difficulty with charting the rise of the delivery is that there is no data recorded for exactly what a ball is doing when it leaves a bowler’s hand.

Equally, it’s part of the strength of the wobble-seam that it doesn’t move every time, and, whatever the reason, CricViz data shows an increase in the number of balls deviating significantly. This is especially true in England, but there has been an uptick globally too. “If you can have the control of that wobble-seam and you can land it in a good area,” says Philander, “I think you're always gonna be in the game, it doesn't matter where you play in the world.”

Take Pat Cummins, the finest Test quick of his generation. Australia is considered one of the least friendly territories to those searching for help in the air or off the pitch. He barely swings the ball, and bowls with what former Australia fast bowling coach Troy Cooley described to Richardson during a 2019 Ashes warm-up as “a dirty seam”. “Which sounds awful,” says Richardson, “in that it's not a natural one that will get that movement in the air. But what he does do, he puts a lot of action on the ball, so it will hit the seam and it will move around.”

Cummins’ teammate Scott Boland is the apotheosis of a bowler eschewing swing while still reaping rewards. His average movement in the air is the lowest of any bowler in the CricViz database. But so is his average itself, which sits at 13.42 after seven Tests.

“It's had an impact on the game,” says Clark of the wobble-seam. “No question about that. People are using it and they're using it more consistently than they ever have.”

The cliché will tell you it’s a batter’s game, but in recent years, bowlers have held sway. In the past five years, Test batting averages have been lower than at any point this century. In the same period, pace bowlers have been at their most incisive, and there has been more seam movement on offer, particularly with the new ball, which now sees over a third of deliveries move off the pitch significantly.

The thing that doesn’t make sense, if the wobble-seam is such a “game-changer”, as Mitchell puts it, why did it take fast bowlers so long to arrive upon it, this miniscule adjustment that makes all the difference?

***

“Maybe I should have patented it, made some money out of it!”

Stuart Clark laughs, but he has a point; if anyone is the Godfather of Wobble-Seam, it’s him. For Clark, the ball was not a deliberate creation, but a result of his own unique, in-built grip, with the top two fingers spread apart, and, crucially, the thumb across the seam rather than next to it. But it was through Clark that Richardson developed his own wobble-seamer, with the two united at Middlesex for a single season in 2005. “I remember sitting for hours with Stuey on the balcony at one of the games, and he was just talking me through it and I was really fascinated,” Richardson recalls.

His influence extends further. It was by watching highlights of Clark in the 2006/07 Ashes, and paying close attention to Mohammad Asif in the 2010 summer, that James Anderson learned to bowl the ball himself in preparation for the 2010/11 Ashes. He finished as the leading wicket-taker to inflict Australia’s only home Ashes defeat in the last 30 years.

Like the ball itself, however, trace the history of the wobble-seam and you can find yourself pulled in any direction.

An example: Stuart Broad learned the ball a whole year before Anderson, despite the two being established as England’s new-ball pair, and from an entirely different source. Broad called it ‘the wobbler’ and it was devised with Jacques Kallis as its intended target. Shaun Pollock was its progenitor, Broad having studied footage of the great South African between England’s first and second Tests in South Africa in 2009 before working in the nets with Ottis Gibson. A last-ditch draw in the opener gave way to an innings victory in the Boxing Day Test.

Philander, meanwhile, landed on it without any outside help. He began as an away-swing bowler, and found he was being left too easily. But in attempting to craft an in-swinger, he would occasionally seam the ball one way or the other by accident. “I was like, ‘flipping hell, this is actually a much better ball to bowl’. Every now and again, I'm trying to get this thing to go back, but it's actually nipping the other way. Some of the batsmen are actually asking me, ‘Flip, your wrist position looked like you wanted to angle it back at us. But it's actually leaving us, did you mean to do that?’”

From there, Philander ditched looking for movement in the air altogether. “Over time, that ball grew on me,” he says. “Swing, it looks nice if you can control it. But a lot of bowlers have gone the way of utilising that wobble-seam a lot more.”

The puzzle of the wobble-seam’s origins can be looked at from two perspectives. If this really is such a devastating way to bowl, why hasn’t everyone always done it? Or: what’s changed to make it such a popular mode of attack now?

What’s certainly true is that, even before Clark, there were wobble-seam balls and even wobble-seam bowlers. Pollock, who inspired Broad, was pre-Clark and has spoken about deliberately utilising the delivery himself. West Indies’ Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose were two others who, through the Nineties, were able to have substantial success without a pristine seam position. Richardson raises the tantalising possibility that, throughout history, the vast majority of seam bowling – delivered with the intention of having the stitching dead straight – has actually been wobble-seam.

“You no doubt will get guys who played first-class cricket in the 70s and 80s who would say 'No, they all came down perfectly straight'. And they might be right. But I'd love to go back and have a look at the close-up of their seam and actually see what it would have been like. It's just been given a title now. I think they've always existed, but the information wasn't out there. I can't believe that we've just suddenly stumbled upon this after how many hundreds of years of cricket.”

But it’s clear that something has changed. There has been an increase in the number of bowlers looking for seam movement, by whatever method.

A clue lies in the stories of Broad and Anderson, disconnected as they are. Each relied on watching reams of footage, from distant series, using tools that weren’t available a few years previously. TV cameras were sharp enough to capture Walsh and Ambrose wobbling the ball. But being able to go back, sit in your hotel room and study on YouTube the subtle tweaks in a bowler’s grip, action and release is something quite different.

And it’s not just about being able to see what others are doing; each quick needs to adapt their own method. The ‘traditional’ way to bowl wobble-seam is to have the fingers split either side of the seam, facing dead straight down the wicket. But this is far from the only option. For example, the likes of Broad and Tim Southee favour holding the ball with two fingers across an angled seam, sometimes referred to as a ‘three-quarter ball’. “Each bowler's action, and their grip, is very individual,” Richardson says. “So just because someone tells you to hold it a certain way doesn't necessarily mean that's the right way for you.”

Until recently, bowlers haven’t been able to see with complete clarity what they themselves are sending down. Richardson is now able to recognise what he was bowling as wobble-seam, but that wasn’t the case at the time. “Even in that stage between 2010-13, I never saw how the ball came out of my hand particularly. I was just like, ‘I'm just hitting the seam’. I would consider myself to be a seam bowler. I never thought about it being a wobble-seam.”

A coach can stand behind or in front of a bowler and recognise swing. The arc will be unmistakable, and the seam spinning on its circumference is possible to pick out without the need for a camera. But, to an extent, all scrambled seams look the same, and deviation off the surface won’t come every time. To check a bowler is doing the right thing, they need something more.

“You need someone to stand behind you to look at your release points,” Philander explains. “Then look at a camera from the front to see how that ball comes out.”

This kind of equipment is now standard, but wasn’t always. “It's a tool coaches use a lot, videoing bowlers and actions and different parts of their technique as well as how the ball comes out and how they're trying to get it to come out,” says Mitchell.

The other factor is the entrenched orthodoxy of swing bowling. “Coaching-wise, we were obsessed with making the ball swing away from the bat – seam bowling was considered a bit of an accident!” says former England batter – and occasional swing bowler – Mark Butcher. “Of all the bowlers picked at the end of the 80s through the 90s, Gus [Angus Fraser] was about the only ‘seamer’.”

As Philander says, “Swing, it looks nice”. This is part of the reason why it has maintained its primacy for so long. Cricket, and especially Test cricket, is an aesthetic pleasure, and swing bowling is key to this. Sweeping arcs intersect with clean lines, cocked wrists are met with high elbows. You can plot a dismissal, put it into practice, and feel the satisfaction when it pays off.

But this is also its weakness. Batters can read swing from the hand, pick up cues in a bowler’s approach. More fundamentally, if there is a plan, then it can be decoded. If a bowler is trying to swing five away and the sixth in, that gives a batter something to work with. The wobble-seam has a chaos element. The ‘plan’, such as it is, is to land the ball in an area, bring every mode of dismissal into play, force the batter to make a decision, and then wait for an error.

The wobble-seam, even by those who bowl it, is described as being “ugly” or “dirty”. A major fascination of the longest format is in the concocting and foiling of stratagems. The wobble-seam can appear as an anathema to that.

But there is a danger in oversimplifying the wobble-seam, as if a bowler can chuck a ball down any which way and wait for something to happen. The more you unpick it, the more its complexities are revealed.

***

In 2021, Virat Kohli arrived for the third and final instalment of the head-to-head duel that had defined Test cricket as much as any in the era, ready to take on James Anderson in England one last time.

Their first bout, in 2014, had gone decisively the way of the bowler, with Kohli averaging 13.40 in the series. In 2018, it was Kohli who won the battle even as England won the war, making a 97 and two hundreds, including perhaps his finest Test innings at Edgbaston, defying Anderson despite India losing 4-1. The next tour arrived with India in the midst of a stretch that would dictate their legacy. Australia had already been dealt with, a half-strength side winning Down Under. South Africa was to follow.

Kohli strode out on the second morning with India 104-2. England had made 183. Anderson had the ball in his hand. What he did next, by the conventional wisdom of fast bowling, shouldn’t have been possible. The first ball Kohli faced was delivered as a ‘traditional’ wobble-seamer, and yet it swung in 1.1 degrees. At which point, it hit the surface, nipped away, and took the edge, Kohli left stunned with a golden duck in his ledger.

The trade-off with wobble-seam bowling is supposed to be that movement in the air is sacrificed in the hope of movement off the pitch. Anderson had shown that both were possible. “I think I'd need a physics degree to explain that, which I'm nowhere near,” says Richardson. “And I think that's the beauty of it, isn't it?”

Philander, however, has a theory, and it’s one that taps into the subtlety and skill of wobble-seam bowling. “We all have a natural action and a natural way that the ball is going to move,” he says. “You want to really pull down behind the seam and allow the ball to almost zip off the surface. If you get the full revolutions behind the ball, your natural shape will still be taking effect.”

Essentially, while the swing might be lessened without the seam to act as a rudder, if a ball is spinning hard in any direction, there’s a chance it will drift in the air. This “zip” is key, and can be lost by bowlers searching too hard for swing. “If you look at certain guys that are trying to swing the ball, they will lose their wrist a little bit,” Philander continues. “So you'll see the two fingers that are supposed to pull down behind the ball often face first slip or second slip. And that's when you're in danger of actually not bowling the ball, of not getting the full revolutions.”

This is a common theme. Richardson refers to it as “rip”, while Essex’s Sam Cook, a more recent wobble-seam exponent, calls it “fizz”.

“Working early with Chris Silverwood, and some of my early bowling coaches, a really good bit of advice they gave was just to try and fizz the ball off your fingers as much as you can,” Cook says. “Put as much energy on your seam as possible, and then if it doesn't come down perfectly, you've still got momentum on the seam to get it to nip in or nip away.”

This begins to get at another of the wobble-seam’s peculiarities. In April, Broad explained how he had been working on rediscovering his outswinger in preparation for the arrival of Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne, but the buried lede was that he labelled his stock delivery as being “wobble-seam trying to nip back on off stump”. This, again, shouldn’t be possible. There should, theoretically, be no way of predicting which way a true wobble-seam ball moves off the pitch. That’s the whole point.

And yet the data shows this isn’t actually the case, with the ball more likely to seam away from both left- and right-handers than it is back into them. And Broad, while he follows this pattern overall, has increased the percentage of deliveries he moves back into right-handers in recent years. But it’s also the ‘fizz’ that a bowler puts on the ball that helps explain this.

“It can almost become a bit like a leg-cutter,” Cook says. "If you're putting pressure on the left side of the ball for example and the majority of the ball is moving away from a right hander. Whereas if you're perfectly behind your wrists with a wobble seam, for example, like Jimmy [Anderson] manages to do, I think there is more of an element of it nipping both ways.”

One of the first great Test bowlers was Sydney Barnes, who claimed 189 wickets at 16.43 in the early 1900s with his own brand of fast spin. “Most deadly of all,” wrote Harry Altham, “was the ball which he would deliver from rather wide on the crease, move in with a late swerve the width of the wicket, and then straighten back off the ground to hit the off stump.”

This sounds like an extreme version of Anderson’s swinging wobble-seamer. Is the story of the wobble-seam partly that of the rediscovery of the virtues of a fast bowler putting as many revs onto the ball as possible?

The most technically gifted are starting to uncover the wobble-seam’s secrets. Speaking in 2022, Anderson explained how he can land the ball on one side consistently, preserving any potential reverse swing on offer. Ollie Robinson goes a step further, with his action so repeatable that, when everything clicks, the number of rotations from releasing to pitching stays constant, allowing him to continuously hit the same spot and, he feels, control which way the ball moves.

Perhaps, rather than being an aberration, the wobble-seam sits squarely in the grand tradition of skilled pace bowling.

***

And what, in all this, of the batter? Far from being resigned to helplessly waiting for a ball to which they have no answer, they are fast at work on finding ways to counter it. The arms race gathers pace.

At Worcester, Mitchell explains how they would line string down the wicket to recreate wobble-seam movement in their throwdowns. He tinkered with his guard, moving closer to the off-stump stance that was the subject of fevered debate in the 2021 summer, but found that didn’t work for him.

Then in 2017, well into the wobble-seam era, he had the best season of his career, with seven hundreds and an average over 55 prompting suggestions he be included as a stopgap for that winter’s Ashes.

“My go-to strategy was trying to get out, get down the wicket as far as I can by batting out of my crease or walking down the wicket to try and put bowlers of their length and then try and get less balls in that business area hitting the stumps,” he says. “I would try and get outside the line with the pads to try and avoid lbw or be too far forward for umpires to want to give you out.”

For Philander, this method presented its challenges. “Steve Smith is one guy that has played me well over the years,” he says. “I think the reason for that is he is often trying to walk into your line, they're trying to upset you, almost trying to push you wider of the stumps.”

Smith finds an answer to the wobble-seam. Stuart Broad repurposes his outswinger specifically for him, even as he notes the wobble-seam is his stock ball. As batters innovate, so too do bowlers.

There are solutions that are less technical and more tactical. Enter Bazball. While England’s all-out attack has been justified in public by a mantra of a need to entertain, there is sound cricketing logic behind it too. Wobble-seam bowling depends on that seam being intact, and one way to blunt the new ball is to whack the hell out of it. Equally, once you get past those fraught early phases, you have to cash in before the next new ball arrives. Only twice in the 2022 summer did an England innings make it to 80 overs.

“England know that new ball is going to be key so they try and get that ball soft as quickly as possible,” says Philander. “But once they've got batsmen in, with that ball losing its hardness, they really try and dominate.”

Who knows what will follow? Today’s bowlers and batters have had to re-figure their methods on the fly. But a generation will come of those who have grown up with full knowledge of the wobble-seam, blank slates ready to be scrawled upon with youthful invention. The next evolution could be just out of sight.

The future is coming down now. What makes it fascinating, and terrifying, is there is no way of telling which way it will dart.