Ishant Sharma’s dreamy knuckleball and its evolution from Langeveldt to Zaheer Khan

Charl Langeveldt admits his IPL memory is hazy. He neither remembers the years he plied in the league nor the expanded names of the franchises he represented, leave alone his price-tag in the auction.

Always inspiring us, our Ishu Bhai 🙌#YehHaiNayiDilli #IPL2023 #GTvDC pic.twitter.com/vAwjWAdSIc

— Delhi Capitals (@DelhiCapitals) May 2, 2023

But he vividly recollects the cities he had visited in his IPL blur, spread across two franchises, for whom he played 13 matches in three years. He asks whether Kolkata is still congested or Bangalore still has those interminable traffic snags. He fondly remembers filter coffee and biryani. And he also remembers the friends he made, and the effervescent smile of his good friend, Zaheer Khan

He doesn’t remember where they first met, but recalls their first conversation. “We were playing against each other. The day before the match, after practice, he walked up to me and asked me how to bowl a knuckleball. I was shocked, because I wondered how he came to know about that. I had bowled it sparsely in international matches, and anyway it hasn’t got me too many wickets either,” he reminiscences. Langeveldt demonstrated him the basic grip and the release.

The year must have been 2010, for soon after, he beheld in utter amusement Zaheer cleaning up Mike Hussey in the 2011 World Cup quarterfinal with a knuckleball, the ball almost floating from Zaheer’s clawed fingers (or rather fingernails) to dropping in front of a befuddled batsman and then reluctantly distorting his stumps. Langeveldt was left stunned. “Jeez, how can you get the guts to bowl that against the best batsman in the world!” he exclaims.

The South African was surprised at how fast Zaheer had nuanced it. He himself had consumed five years to perfect the knuckleball and another five before he gathered the courage to bowl one in an international match. But Zaheer had taken less than a year’s time, and he had elevated it from a change-ball to a genuine wicket-taking weapon. “Of course, he must have been working on this for a while, but to perfect it like that, he must be a genius, I thought then,” he says.

𝘼𝙉𝘿 𝙃𝙀 𝘿𝙄𝘿 𝙄𝙏…🥹@ImIshant pic.twitter.com/lYTww91wq5

— Delhi Capitals (@DelhiCapitals) May 2, 2023

Soon after the World Cup, which India won, Zaheer and Langeveldt met again. This time, they were Royal Challengers Bangalore teammates. “This first thing I asked on meeting him was to teach me how to bowl the knuckle ball that he bowled to Hussey. Zaheer laughed and asked me how I can teach the teacher himself,” he remembers.

To his surprise, Zaheer was more inquisitive about the knuckleballs. ”The more I explained to him, the more he wanted to learn about it. He used to ask me whether he can bowl a knuckleball bouncer, which I had bowled in a county match and several other minor technical aspects about the knuckeball. I used to tell him that I had passed on everything I knew of it to him. But almost every interaction of us ended with some discussion or the other on the knuckleball,” he remembers.

The floaty, dancing knucklers have become something of a flavour, and has transformed from a “prank ball” to a more regular, and trusted tool of deception. “Back in my days, I never used to bowl more than one knuckleball in an over. Frankly, it was not considered as a wicket-taking option. It was used just to disrupt the flow of the match. But now you see them bowling 3-4 an over and picking wickets fairly regularly,” he observes.

Deception at its best! 👊🏻

What a ball that from @ImIshant 🔥🔥#GT have lost four wickets now and this is turning out to be a tricky chase!

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Like for instance Australian and Gujarat Lions’ seamer Andew Tye, for whom the knuckleball is more like a stock delivery. In fact, two of his three hat-trick deliveries were fashioned with the knuckles. A bevy of Indian bowlers too have suddenly warmed up to its raking potential, like Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Mohit Sharma and Siddharth Kaul, Sandeep Sharma. Mohit Sharma, who says he learnt if from Bhuvneshwar, has been quite proficient with it at the death. Langeveldt will be surprised to learn how fast they have picked it. Bhuvneshwar began practising towards the end of the Australia Test series while Mohit began dabbling with it at start of 2017 and put it into practice at the same tournament.

Who did Langveldt learn it from?

It’s spoken about with a wide-eyed wonderment, as if they have unearthed something indecipherable, something equivalent to a fast bowler’s doosra. They suppose it can be a game-changer like the knuckleballs in baseball, where it remains an incredibly revered dark art, difficult to master, but the few who have enjoy cult status. And like baseball, there could be knuckleball specialists in future.

But Kenny Jackson, better known as Jonathan Trott’s half-brother, and from who Langeveldt learned the craft, is no baseball buff. Instead, he picked it from softball, which his mother Donna played (she was a hockey international too). Though the softball is larger than a baseball, it has a more raised seam like cricket.

“My mother was a softball international and I had seen her holding the ball on her knuckles. I also noticed that the ball used to behave weirdly in the air, like sometimes it even zig-zags,” says Kenny, now long retired from all forms of cricket.

Kenny was primarily a batsman, but in the pre-reintegration days, he found it immensely difficult to break into the strong Western Province team solely on his batting skills. So he decided to sharpen his medium-pace bowling skills. “Then I had a problem. I didn’t have much pace and because of my height (5 feet 10 inches), I couldn’t purchase bounce either. Then it suddenly struck me, why not try and bowl with the knuckles like my mom,” he says.

So in the backyard of his house, he would ask his mother to demonstrate him the knuckleball with the softball ball. Then he would simulate it with the cricket ball. Kenny used to practice those deep into the evening. “At first, the ball used to slip out of my palms or it used to fly sideways and sometimes even out of the compound. So my first aim was to get the ball straight,” he says.

Once he achieved control, he began experimenting in the local leagues and the club circuit. “Nobody had any clue about it,” he says, with a sense of pride.

Subsequently, he re-prioritised on batting, though he brushed up his quirky art at the nets. “I used to just fool around with the ball. No one took it seriously, and I would use it as a delivery to off-put the batsman, rather than look to take his wicket. It was only later in my career that I began to use it more regularly. In fact, I was pretty successful with it, and even took a five-for with mostly knuckleballs. It was then called freakish,” he says.
Though he is pretty sure he hasn’t seen or heard anybody bowling with their knuckles, he makes no brags about it. “With the kind of research and science in cricket, they must have developed it from baseball. They must not have even heard of me,” he says.

Who invented Knuckleball?

There isn’t much curated history either to throw light on the knuckleball’s inventor. It’s supposed that Alan Connolly, an Australian seamer who plied in the 60s, possessed one. But the details of it are largely sketchy. It’s strange, because cricket historians generally are pretty keen on celebrating pioneers. Like how English leg-spinner Bernard Bosanquet is celebrated for his googly, and West Indies fast bowler Franklyn Stephenson for his slower delivery.

Then, even baseball is not sure of its knuckleball inventor. Some believe it was Toad Ramsey, who was a bricklayer in the late 19th century, while some others credit it to Eddie Cicotte, who came a generation further and was nicknamed “Knuckles”. But like with myths, it’s best that the genesis of the delivery is as intriguing as the delivery itself.

But whether Jackson invented it or not, it can be fairly assumed that it travelled to India via the Cape of Good Hope.

Neither Langeveldt nor Jackson are aware, or even bothered, about the mechanics of the knuckleball. All they vouch for is the unpredictability of the delivery—something the baseball knucklers too chorus—and how they propel it. The physicists who have massively researched on the knuckleball (the baseball version that is), summon Bernoulli’s principle, the Magnus effect, and the Prandtl boundary-layer theory, for a start.

This much, though, is easy: the stitches on a baseball interrupt the flow of air around the leather surface. Then it gets complicated. The air meeting the ball speeds up as it’s disturbed, to compensate for the initial holdup. This increased airspeed causes the pressure (on the side of the stitches) to drop. Subsequently, the ball follows the lower pressure, and the consequent backspin slows the ball’s flight.

Resultantly, the ball floats in the air—a reason renowned knuckler Charlie Hough analogised the ball to a “butterfly with hiccups”–and drops alarmingly at the batsman. The batsman, probably anticipating a juicy full toss, preempts the big heave but ends up flailing at the thin air, like Hussey that afternoon in Motera.

But it’s not as simple as that. For it’s incredibly hard to perfect the art, because the bowler is relying primarily on the strength of his finger-tips, as the wrists and the palms are less accentuated. There is no snap of the wrists and you have to disguise it. This to former fast bowler Venkatesh Prasad is the most difficult part of the knuckleball. But this is also where Zaheer is so clever at, and the reason he is a more nuanced practitioner than most others.

“The key to his knuckleball is how he holds it in his run-up. He covers it with both palms, and then during the gather he slips it to the bowling arm. The role of the non-bowling arm is crucial. He also maintains the same arm-speed,” points out Prasad. A batsman, then, would need binoculars to decipher the clawed grip.

But overuse of anything can lead to redundancy. Word gets around, tactics are discussed, replays are dissected threadbare and the mysterious is rendered mundane.

Langeveldt, though, has a counterpoint: “It has been in baseball for more than a century and it still remains a mystery.” If the knuckleball in cricket can sustain itself half as long as its baseball counterpart, or acquire half its aura, it could be spoken about as an ingenious variation rather than a fly-by-night novelty tactic. Ishant’s knuckleball and Steyn’s reaction have brought back the ball into public imagination.