Before Bumrah, there was the man who invented the Moonball

Experts point to the overusage of slower balls from Jasprit Bumrah as the reason behind his poor form: gone over the top

3 min readUpdated: May 2, 2026 11:27 AM IST

Jasprit Bumrah in action. (FILE photo)It is an unusually poor season for Jasprit Bumrah for the Mumbai Indians. The wickets have not been coming as Bumrah is accustomed, and strangely enough, the Mumbai ace-pacer has taken a bit of tapping in recent games. Experts have observed that there is a dip in the pace of Bumrah, and he has also been over-reliant on the slower ones, which is a byproduct of playing on slightly sluggish surfaces at the backend of the T20 World Cup 2026 that is causing his downfall. “I think it was also influenced a little bit by the back end of T20 World Cup. Because of the nature of surfaces, lots of games taken place, the slower ball became so effective. I think at the start of this tournament, it was kind of a hangover of that one was effective, let’s stick with it,” former South African cricketer Shaun Pollock said on Cricbuzz.Reminding the strengths of Bumrah, Pollock said: “He still needs to understand that his speed deliveries, his different action, his ability to shape the ball, that still needs to go to. That’ll be the stuff that strikes up front in particular. If you come on in the second spell and you bowl those slower balls, that’s fine. I’m not saying he’s gone over the top, but I think there’s been a little bit more of a reliance on that delivery.” Another expert, Simon Doull, too concurred with Pollock’s views and urged Bumrah to not to bowl a slower one in his first 12 deliveries. “I think he has gone over the top with the slower balls. I’d like to see him bowl the first 12 deliveries if he bowls two overs in the powerplay and not bowl his slow ball.” Doull also expressed his concerns over Bumrah’s fitness, “Just, you know, his pace is down and whether that’s again a hangover of what’s happening in that setup if he’s not 100% fit, I don’t know, obviously coming off the World Cup. But I’d just like to see him hit a good hard length. If batters are good enough to hit you off that good hard length, then think about changing it, but too often too many bowlers go to something different for the sake of going to something different. His slow ball is a surprise and it’s a brilliant slow ball, but people are actually sitting there waiting for it a little bit this year.”

Experts point to the overusage of slower balls from Jasprit Bumrah as the reason behind his poor form: gone over the top

3 min readUpdated: May 2, 2026 11:27 AM IST

Before Bumrah, there was the man who invented the Moonball

The ball that captures the devastating essence of the slower ball in this era is arguably not the slower ball itself. But Josh Hazlewood’s fake slower ball — the bluff of a bluff.The variety is beguiling: the door-knobbed floaters of Jasprit Bumrah; the knuckled stingers of Bhuvneshwar Kumar; the devil-fingered dippers of Lungi Ngidi; the spongy-bounced cheats from the back of Ashok Sharma’s palms. The origin stories are many, like medieval myths, but the most verified involves a strapping quick from Barbados, fatigue and a Eureka moment.In the early 80s, when West Indies cricket was at its peak, Franklyn Stephenson, an ambitious fast bowler from a quiet parish in Barbados packed his bags to the Lancashire leagues, dreaming of playing for West Indies one day. But Lancashire was not what he’d imagined. “I had to make money,” he tells The Indian Express. “For that I had to play as many games as possible.” Weekend, weekday — it didn’t matter. “Then, I got tired,” he says with a shrill chuckle. When tiredness crept in, he resorted to off-spin at times. “But I got hit. As any fast bowler worth his salt would say, I hated getting hit. With the same action, I slipped in a faster ball when bowling off-breaks. It surprised batsmen, and that is when the scope of mixing up the pace hit me,” he says. Caribbean fast bowlers were taught to bowl fast. Pace reduction was blasphemy. Andy Roberts was blunter: “I didn’t bowl a slow bouncer. I had only two varieties — the fast bouncer and a faster bouncer.” One evening in the nets, he decided to invert the trick: bowl a slower one when he was bowling fast. No one would teach him, because no one knew it. “I decided to bowl the slower ball with an off-spinner’s grip, with the same long run-up and arm-speed. It worked,” he says. It stopped working too. “Batsmen started reading it from the grip, because my run-up was such that the batsmen could see my grip,” he said. In his pursuit of disguise, he found a rare, natural gift. “I could change the grip during my run-up. When I ran in, I held the ball like I would normally — index and middle finger slightly apart but still on the seam. The batsman had a full view of the ball. Just before the leap, I slipped my index finger down and tweaked the ball with middle and index fingers, like an off-spinner,” he says. The ball came out of the tips of his fingers. The theatrics of the ball stunned him. It rose higher from his palms than the seam-up ones, before dropping viciously late on the batsmen. “Seeing the initial trajectory, most batsmen ducked thinking it was a beamer. To their shock, they find the stumps shattered or the ball hitting the pads,” he says. A Sky Sports director christened it the Moonball.Story continues below this ad He tried teaching the technique to some of the young bowlers from his country. “Even Jofra, but he said he simply couldn’t. Each one should do what he is comfortable with. For example, Courtney had a different technique — he let the ball roll along his palms without clicking his wrists,” he points out. He ran in like a locomotive, and released like a whiplash. The incongruous motions were designed for the bouncer — the hand coming down like a whiplash. He had a fiendish one too. They came in full gear to repel his short ball. Then they left befuddled with the ones that barely landed or bounced. “It’s the simple theory: the faster you are, the better your slower ball would be,” he says. The caveat, though, is disguise. He used to operate upwards of 140 kph and drop the pace to less than 100 kph, but without decipherable alterations in action or arm-speed, and with a command of lengths. “Lengths are important, again because the batsman can’t size you up. The slower balls behave differently when bowled at different lengths,” he says. The fuller ones swerved and dipped; those of a good length spun. “Sometimes like an off-break,” he says. A slower ball to Brian Hardie in the Benson and Hedges final in 1989 spun almost a foot from out

Before Bumrah, there was the man who invented the Moonball

Experts point to the overusage of slower balls from Jasprit Bumrah as the reason behind his poor form: gone over the top

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Experts point to the overusage of slower balls from Jasprit Bumrah as the reason behind his poor form: gone over the top

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Before Bumrah, there was the man who invented the Moonball