Swing bowling

A swing bowler often bowls a mixture of inswingers and outswingers (as well as other non-swinging types of delivery), by changing how they hold the ball.

This is where teams have allegedly tried to alter the wear of the ball illegally using materials such as sandpaper, to produce additional swing.

The purpose of swing bowling is to get the cricket ball to deviate sideways as it moves through the air towards or away from the batter.

This can be done in two ways: The curvature of swing deliveries can make them difficult for a batter to hit with their bat.

Typically, bowlers more commonly bowl outswingers, as they tend to move away from the batter, meaning they have to "chase" the ball to hit it.

[6] Some of the most famous left-arm bowlers were Pakistan's Wasim Akram, Mohammad Amir and Shaheen Afridi, India's Zaheer Khan and Irfan Pathan, Australia's Alan Davidson, Mitchell Johnson and Mitchell Starc, Sri Lanka's Chaminda Vaas and New Zealand's Trent Boult.

This gives it a very different character from normal swing, and because batters experience it less often, they generally find it much more difficult to defend against.

Two consecutive deliveries from Wasim Akram, one of each type, were considered to be the turning point of the 1992 World Cup Final.

[9] Sarfraz Nawaz introduced reverse swing into international cricket during the late 1970s, and passed their knowledge on to their team-mate Imran Khan,[10] who in turn taught the duo of Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis.

The English pair of Andrew Flintoff and Simon Jones, having been taught by Troy Cooley and the Indian bowlers like Zaheer Khan and Ajit Agarkar, were also well known for the ability to reverse swing, among many others.

Firstly, a batter needs good eye reflexes which are considered to be a key skill when facing swing bowling.

Controversy regarding reverse swing has never left modern cricket, as the Pakistani team was accused of ball tampering by the Australian umpire Darrell Hair during the fourth test against England in 2006 when the ball began to reverse swing after the 50th over.