When South Africa-born Dutch all-rounder Kenny Jackson mused with the idea of bowling a knuckleball with the cricket ball, a thought that struck him when watching his mother at softball, he barely thought it possessed game-changing dimensions in a distant future. Jackson, a batting all-rounder, just wanted to experiment so that it instills his humble military medium pace bowling with a layer of mystery. He learned the grip from his mother — softball ball, like cricket, has a pronounced seam — and nuanced the ball in his backyard under the eyes of his mother. When he began to use it, batsmen in the local leagues were left bamboozled. But no one took Jackson or his “prank ball” seriously, as his modest career petered out at the stroke of the century. Whether the knuckleball is Jackson’s invention or not is sketchy. Some cricket historians credit it to the 1960s Australian seamer Alan Connolly. But as with myths and origin stories, no one knows the ultimate truth. Someone might have plied the ball long before Jackson or Connolly, just like the googly could have preexisted the days of its supposed founder Bernard Bosanquet, or the doosra before Saqlain Mushtaq. Whatever be its lineage, it has route-mapped into a staple variation in all formats of the game. If it was Zaheer Khan who first popularized the ball — he learned it from former South African fast bowler Charl Langeveldt, adding heft to the theory that it might have been Jackson’s invention — in the 2011 ODI World Cup, it soon became a poison-tipped dart in the T20 bowling quiver, as the leagues mushroomed around the world. It was not too long before it entered the landscape of Test cricket. Almost every frontline bowler has mastered it. James Anderson bowled a couple against Pat Cummins in the ongoing Oval Test. Chris Woakes, a polished knuckle-baller, produced a peach against Steve Smith. The latter assumed the ball was on a fuller length and shaped for the full-blooded drive down the ground. But then the ball suddenly dropped, in the good-length zone of the hard-length band. The gift of playing the ball as late as possible saved Smith, as he converted his drive to a front-foot push. The ball, though, arrived much later than he had judged, bounced more than he had anticipated and hit the sticker of the blade. This was the perfect illustration of the knuckleball’s unpredictable trajectory. Everything about the ball, apart from the grip, was the same as any of his deliveries. The same action, the same arm- speed, the same release point, except that the ball dipped suddenly, almost died, and lost all its velocity after landing, like it was drugged midair. It’s the biggest difference between a slower-ball and knuckle-ball, the sudden, unpredictable drop. Other slower-ball variations too drop, but not this alarmingly or exaggeratedly. Though it does not flutter or zig-zag like a knuckleball in baseball, it sometimes wobbles and hangs mid-air, depending on the atmospheric conditions. It’s an incredibly difficult craft to grasp, especially the grip. It’s not the knuckles that grip the ball, as the name suggests, but the finger-tips. The index and middle fingers are clawed rather than curved; there is little cushioning from the inside of the fingers that usually holds the ball. Strength of finger tips The bowler relies primarily on the strength of his finger-tips, as the wrists and the palms are less accentuated, besides the non-existence of the wrist-snap. The core strength of the fingers are utmost important, lest the ball slips away. Langeveldt says he took a couple of years just to master the grip, and another to polish the release. All of these make the knack of disguising the ball harder, but proficient executors of the knuckleball were all masters of disguise. But its journey has been remarkable, from a nondescript backyard of a modest all-rounder to the grandest of all stages.
