On Yorkers

Very early in the history of the IPL, Anil Kumble once dismissed Adam Gilchrist for a duck in the first over of the innings. Kumble was bowling with the new ball. Gilchrist tried to slog him to the leg side boundary, missed the ball and was bowled. At the time, a few observed that Kumble had bowled a googly. A few others ran with this and said Gilchrist had failed to pick the googly, and that Kumble had foxed him.

In reality, Gilchrist’s slog suggested that he didn’t particularly care what Kumble was bowling. There was little time - only 20 overs - and that one had to go. Gilchrist had picked the boundary of his choice and aimed for it.

Something similar has happened in the 2020 IPL with yorkers. Jasprit Bumrah and T Natarajan (especially) have bowled their yorkers and gotten a few high profile dismissals. When the batsmen has missed it, as Shikhar Dhawan did against Bumrah and as AB de Villiers did against Natarajan, the yorker has looked spectacular. As with Gilchrist against Kumble, this has more to do with the batsman not caring about defending their wicket than it has to do with the quality of the yorker. It doesn’t suggest that these bowlers are uniquely better than other bowlers at delivery them. Nor does it suggest that the yorker is a particularly potent weapon for a bowler.

It is hard to show that this is the case since a record of the line and length of each delivery in the history of Test cricket is hard to come by. But there is some evidence in the dismissal record. If we consider the eleven most prolific fast bowlers in Test history and organize their dismissals by batting position of the wicket, then one can see that bowled dismissals in general are significantly rarer against specialist batsmen (batting in positions 1 to 5) than they are against tailenders (9, 10 and 11) and even those in the lower order (6, 7 and 8).

Of the 194 top order bats Waqar Younis dismissed, 39 were bowled. By contrast, of the 79 tailenders he dismissed, 34 were bowled. Some fraction of each were probably yorkers. But a far more common reason for batsmen, especially tailenders, getting bowled to pace bowling was swing, especially late swing, conventional or reverse.

In this example from Rob Moody’s excellent archive, Waqar Younis gets three Australians out bowled. None of the three balls is a yorker. The first is a knee high full toss, the second is on a good length and the third is a half volley. In each case, the batsman is beaten by the swing and not the length.

This can be specified even more precisely. Fast bowlers generally tend to get the vast majority of their dismissals (whether it is ultimately bowled, caught or lbw) by defeating either the inner or outer edge of the bat, rather than the toe of the bat. The yorker is a delivery which pitches on or around the batting crease, give or take a few inches. It passes under the bat, or, as the commentators always say, the batsman fails to get the bat down in time. This is different from the batsman playing down the wrong line (which was the case in each of the three dismissals in video above).

Even if we consider Shoaib Akhtar who got a lot of batsmen bowled the same pattern holds. 32 of the 100 top order batsmen Akhtar dismissed were bowled. 21 of the 36 tailenders he dismissed were bowled.

A fast bowler who can deliver inch perfect yorkers to order at 90 miles an hour and sequence deliveries in such a way that most of them beat the bottom of the bat may yet emerge. But thus far, over a century of Test cricket, there’s little evidence in the Test record of such a bowler. The art of fast bowling depends centrally, and overwhelmingly, on beating the two edges of the bat rather than its bottom. For the most part, specialist batsmen keep the yorker length out if it does not swing.

In T20, yorkers are equally rare. But a lot more bowlers are likely to get bowled dismissals because batsmen attack more, which means that they commit to more expansive strokes more often and hence its easier for the bowler to get past the outside or inside edge of the bat. There’s some evidence to suggest this. Every single bowler in the list below gets bowled dismissals against top order batsmen more often in ODIs than in Tests.

So yorkers look more spectacular in T20, but this doesn’t mean that the bowler bowling them is uniquely good at delivering them. What you’re watching is the batsman caring less about getting out, and caring more about finding the boundary.