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World Cup brings back wicket-taking yorker

FE Sports Desk | July 10, 2019 00:00:00


The delivery which made Waqar Younis or Wasim Akram so lethal, a traditional yorker is one where the ball lands around the batsmen's feet, bouncing on or near the popping crease in an attempt to break the stumps and dismiss the batsman.

From the late '80s through the '90s and the early 2000s, yorkers came into a game sparingly but with full of purpose.

World Cup of yorker

The wicket-taking yorker is back. Led by Starc, Sheldon Cortrell, Jasprit Bumrah, Jofra Archer, Jason Behendorff, all come together on the world stage to tell the bullying batsmen that they have sharpened a key weapon of theirs.

Nothing has defined the 2019 World Cup like the yorker. Not even, hard as it tried, bad weather.

Mitchell Starc phased one through alternate dimensions and right into poor Ben Stokes' unsuspecting off stump in a particularly high-profile entry into the great halls of yorkerdom. Lockie Ferguson roughed Faf du Plessis up with a bouncer at the throat before rattling his off stump - the old-school, sepia-tinted, one-two combo. Trent Boult, conjurer of swing, took an entire hat-trick worth of yorkers.

Dawlat Zadran, Jason Holder, Stokes himself, Mohammed Saifuddin and even Bhuvneshwar Kumar all reaped wickets from the delivery, before Shaheen Afridi, the freshest fast-bowling phenomenon from Pakistan, the spiritual home of the yorker, did right by the tournament, and the craft, by signing off with a pair of imperious yorker wickets of his own.

Malinga leads most wickets with yorkers

Offerings from the younger, faster bowlers might have been flashier, but Lasith Malinga's are the yorkers want to grow old with. They are still quick enough when required, deliciously slow when you need them to be, dipping deviously, and reverse-swinging not from side to side but right into the ground, such is the force generated by his singular action. Out of bowlers who have taken wickets from bona-fide yorkers - ones that pitch exactly in the blockhole, and not a few inches further up or down - no one has more dismissals this tournament than Malinga's five. His yorkers have claimed the wickets of Steven Smith, Quinton de Kock, Jos Buttler, Dawlat Zadran and Hamid Hassan in this World Cup.

Comparison of yorker between 2015 World Cup and 2019

In the 2015 World Cup, yorkers were hit for almost a run a ball, and yielded a wicket only once in every 26.4 deliveries, but this time they have been vastly more profitable for bowlers. The batting strike rate against the delivery at this World Cup has been 34 per cent lower than it had been four years ago, and the yorker has brought a wicket at an astounding rate of once every 11.2 deliveries.

All this with the finest yorker bowler in existence yet to bowl a truly memorable one. Jasprit Bumrah has been slinging them down with the accuracy of some overpowered video-game freak, furious pace and all, but has only removed two batsmen with it. Perhaps batsmen are more wary against him. More likely, they have been lucky.

Bouncers are a spectacle, but they risk bodily harm, and so you often sympathise with the assailed. Yorkers, more than any other fast-bowling delivery, bestow a sense of professional incompetence upon the defeated batsman.

T20 cricket gives advantages to bring back yorker

This is a sublime resurgence, because thanks to T20 cricket, the yorker was very recently deemed to be going out of vogue. It is too high-risk a delivery, analysts said, because if a bowler even slightly under-pitches, a batsman merely sits deep in his crease and clobbers what is now a half-volley way down the ground. Other batsmen have learned to drill it through the off side.


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