How the wobble seam remade fast-medium bowling this century
Wisden Cricket Monthly's 100th issue charts the wobble seam delivery's rise as a defining innovation of 21st-century cricket, favouring craft over raw pace.
A single delivery has done more than almost any other technical development to reshape seam bowling this century, according to Wisden Cricket Monthly's 100th issue, which set out to identify 100 ways the sport has changed since 2000.
The wobble seam ball, delivered with the seam held upright but allowed to move fractionally in the air before jagging off its line on pitching, has given a generation of bowlers without express pace a route to genuine menace.
Wisden Cricket Monthly credits Stuart Clark with first perfecting the delivery, before Stuart Broad brought it into wider use at international level.
The bowling coach Troy Cooley, quoted in the feature, described the method memorably as a "dirty seam" delivery.
Its spread has been credited with helping a distinctive type of bowler thrive: skiddy, canny operators who lack raw speed but compensate with the ball's late, unpredictable deviation. Vern Philander, Mohammad Abbas, Scott Boland and Sam Cook are named by Wisden Cricket Monthly as exemplars of this style.
The magazine links the delivery's popularisation to a broader shift in the balance between bat and ball, arguing it has contributed to declining batting averages and an era in which bowlers, rather than batters, more often hold the upper hand.
The wobble seam feature forms part of a wider retrospective in the milestone issue, in which Wisden Cricket Monthly sets out 15 things the sport has gained this century and 10 it has lost, according to Guardian Cricket.
The full list, spanning tactical, technological and cultural change across the game, is being published to mark the magazine's 100th edition.