Montreal didn't have much taped ball cricket, hardly any really. But, Ottawa was different. We had a lot of Pakistani friends, all software engineers inevitably. Ottawa is a bit like Bangalore in that sense. We had all kinds of India-Pakistan games, Nortel (10 Indians, one Pakistani) vs Alcatel (three-fourths Pakistani), a combined India-Pak team vs Jam-E-Umr or just plain India vs Pakistan, all taped ball and mostly in a Nortel parking lot. Taped ball, insulation taped, no slit in the tape as Rahul B describes in his book, but just one layer of tight insulation tape over a new fluffy Wilson tennis ball.

The Nortel parking lot was at a very slight incline, the bowler running up a minor slope. This might have enhanced the feeling that the parking lot pitch was an absolute belter. But, only by a bit. This parking lot surface is easily the toughest pitch any of us ever bowled on. Zero movement off the pitch, obviously, with a ball of no mentionable seam and an absolute rock hard pitching area. This is where you tried to land your front foot as close to the bowling crease as possible. Every centimetre seemed to make a difference.

If a batsman really got his eye in, it was very difficult to get him out. You could tie things down by bowling yorker-length, or go around the wicket and create an angle to stop the big swing to leg. But, the length had to be perfect either way. A tiny bit this way or that, and the ball would disappear into the woods at midwicket or straight back past you into the next parking lot. The taped ball made sure the hits went the distance. A batsman could hit through the line most of the time.

You could get swing if the tape got a bit damaged. Or the taping wasn't done properly. But, even with the swing, your length had to be close to perfect. Mis-hits very frequently went over the fence, or in our case, into the woods.

So, really, the parking lot pitch was a hard task master. You became a better bowler for the experience. You had to be a decent exponent of the yorker to survive. And, you learnt to keep the ball up around good length. Most of all, you had to keep mixing things up. The round the wicket line helped a lot. Also, you tried to bowl as quickly as possible, because if you erred in length, and bowled a bit slow, you held no hope. But, at a quicker pace (by club cricket standards, obviously), there was just a bit more room for error.

The basic problems you faced as a bowler with a non-taped tennis ball and a taped one were very similar, only the parking lot offering truer bounce was harder to bowl on.

Let us return now to Aqib Javed. The points he brings up in the course of his thesis on Pakistan's remarkable fast bowling strengths over the years (in sharp contrast with India's lack of the same):
1. Punjabi diet over the years has led to a taller and more well built population.
2. A beef-based diet promotes aggression.
3. Taped-ball cricket results in bowlers developing more muscle as a result of trying to bowl fast with a relatively light ball (lighter than the regular cricket ball, that is).
4. The presence of fast bowling idols.

Point 1 is a somewhat valid one in the sense that Punjabis and Pathans from the NWP on the average are of bigger build than the populace of the rest of the subcontinent. Imran and Waqar or even Shoaib aren't overly tall however, so at times, the point is a bit moot. I suspect Imran played a big part in encouraging young fast bowlers who got into the Pakistan team to work on their fitness and strength, so point 1 (from a point of view of physical strength) is more of a sort of corollary to point 4.

Point 2, we can quickly discount, because there is a lot of non-beef based food that are known to promote aggression. And, it is not as if beef would somehow promote aggression selectively only in bowlers. I remember watching a combination of Shoaib Mohammed, Rizwan-Uz-Zaman and Younis Ahmed in the mid-to-late eighties and nearly always, dozing off perfectly peacefully to the dull thud of dead bat on ball.

Point 4 is a very valid one obviously. And, I'll return to that in a bit.

Point 3 about fast bowlers developing muscle bowling with a taped ball is an interesting one. However, I'm not really sure whether it has had that serious an effect on the sustained development of fast bowling in Pakistan. Or at least, I'm not convinced bowling with a taped tennis ball has a different effect on your enthusiasm to bowl fast when young, in comparison with using a non-taped ball. Although better to bowl with than a new fluffy non-taped tennis ball, taped ball cricket is still heavily loaded in favour of the batsman. Especially when played in parking lots. It made you a more street-smart bowler yes, because you had to work out quickly how to contain a free-swinging batsman. You'd try bowling as quickly as possible, not because it encouraged you to, but because otherwise even the smallest error in length would be punished.

Most of this is the case with regular tennis ball cricket as well though, and generally since you used the same ball for a few weeks, the fluff would soon disappear and then you were left with something not hugely different from a taped ball in terms of speed through the air. Rahul B in his book talks about the joys of bowling with a taped tennis ball with a slit, because of the resultant swing. While swing definitely spurs a bowler on, equally, I somehow do not remember being discouraged trying to bowl fast with a regular tennis ball simply because you never thought you were bowling slow when you are a kid. In your mind, you were always Marshall, Imran or Holding. So, overall, bowling with any kind of tennis ball, is definitely useful in building early shoulder strength, and helps in learning how to bowl the yorker. But, the differences between the taped one and the non-taped one in terms of encouraging you to bowl fast, I'm not so sure about. That is, I'm not convinced that the early playing environs (taped ball vs non-taped ball) in Pakistan and India are really very different. And, generally, if you are good at bowling with one, you are good with the other as well.

Aqib talks about reverse swing in a different context, but I think it's a combination of point 4 plus reverse swing that has really sustained pace bowling in Pakistan. It is not really taped ball cricket, nor is it as much a question of raw physical strength. Marshall, Holding and Roberts were just as fast or at times faster (perhaps not as consistently scary I must admit) than Clarke, Croft and Garner. Theories of that sort are mostly cases of misplaced machismo. Nor, quite obviously is it as simple a matter as eating beef.

At the core, it is the fact that Imran bowled really fast and became very successful at doing it, that has sparked the fine array of fast bowlers in Pakistan since. This allied with the discovery of reverse swing. The effect that a fast, late deep inswinger sending a middle stump cartwheeling can have on a whole generation of young cricketers should not be underestimated. It's a lot like Gavaskar inspiring a whole generation of young Indian batsmen. Akram, Younis, Akhtar, Tendulkar, Laxman, Dravid and Sehwag, all driven indirectly or directly by inspiration. An Inzamam and a Pathan are slight aberrations to this inspirational rule. Why Imran took up fast bowling and Gavaskar became a batsman I'd like to put down to individual inclinations.

The other factor that has helped is Imran himself nurturing raw young talent from non-urban centres. The nurturing aspect finds a parallel in India with a whole host of excellent batting coaches. Fast bowlers are a sensitive lot. If not encouraged early, they quickly peter out into run-of-the-mill medium pacers. Similary with young batsmen. They quickly lose focus and motivation if not given enough attention.

This snowballing effect is obvious if you watch a game involving a random bunch of Indians and Pakistanis. On an average, the Pakistanis would have longer run-ups and the Indians would hold their pose longer after a checked straight drive. It is another matter, whether the long run-ups always result in faster bowlers or whether the straight-battedness would last. But, in a slightly rambling way, I will rest my case.

Is there another factor that is missing here? One thing that I have seen written by many writers is that pace through the air matters a lot more on the dull pitches of Pakistan. Thus a bowler like Harmison, who on fast pitches bangs it in short and uses his height to extract wickets, has problems when speed through the air is a bigger factor. Although I've never played tape-ball, from what you are suggesting here, it sounds to me like a full ball and a fast ball are both vital weapons in success. Does this filter through to Pakistani cricket in general?

I played nothing but tape-ball cricket in a concrete parking lot, and my experience was slightly different.

We used to tape the entire ball for a 15 over match with one colour, and a single line of tape of a different colour around it to act as a seam. It worked pretty well, and would even reverse after 8-9 overs.

And usually the fast bowlers who could swing the ball came out trumps - the concrete somehow helped the ball to skid thru and actually leave the pitch area faster than it was delivered.

Then I came to Mumbai and discovered the complete lack of a tape-ball culture. Probably because of the lack of space. Mostly rubber-ball cricket, which sucked. Now THAT is a total batsman's paradise..

Why Imran "took up Fast bowling" was not due to "individual inclinations",
he wanted to be a batsman, like all young Pakistanis( and Indians) but while bowling in "First-Class" cricket in Pakistan, he discovered that, due to his Chest -On action, which generated considerable in-swing, he picked up a lot of wickets because Pakistani Batsmen were fond of playing across the line , and when they missed they would get bowled, thus, after Sarfraz Nawaz , Imran became the second highest wicket taker in Pakistan in 1971(if memory serves me) It was by accident that he became Pakistan's Spearhead. In his Autobiography, he states that he didn't even count off the number of steps in his run-uo. He simply walked back and turned around, and ran in. Even Sir Geoff Boycott said of Imran" He was a Fast Bowler but he didn't know it"( until 1977- when he took 12 in a Test against Australia)Anyway, he was my first, and favourite, cricket idol.

Yes, definitely pace through the air matters on subcontinental pitches in general. I think Harmison's (and England's) problems were compounded by lack of seam movement and the absence of Simon Jones.

Definitely, tape ball forces you to bowl fuller. Same holds true for regular tennis ball though. Only real difference is the truer bounce in parking lot cricket makes it tougher on the bowler.

Interesting comments:

Shrik,

Sounds like the taped ball cricket you played was a bit different from ours. Where did you play your games? I mean, where in Pakistan?
Something that would be interesting to know is when taped cricket started in Pakistan.

On our parking lot pitches, the balls when they got damaged, wouldn't exactly get damaged in such a way that the swing would be predictable. And, it would get damaged so badly that you had to replace it with newer tape. Plus, I do not think you could call the swing you got, reverse swing. That was just swing in the direction of the (more) damaged side. Perhaps you equated it with reverse swing?

BTW, Mumbai isn't representative of all of India :) We had lots of space in Kerala (perhaps being not so urbanised, and a lot of empty grounds, where tennis ball cricket was absolutely great (for both batsmen and bowlers).

Feroz,
By 'individual inclinations' I did not mean, just inclinations of the mind. Thanks for pointing out the fact that Imran originally meant to be a bat. I wasn't aware of that.

He had a more chest-on action I knew, which is an individual inclination as well, you know :)

Individual inclinations take a bit of time to develop at times, Shastri ended up a better bat than a bowler, case in point.

Oops!!
Apologies for my Imran Khan post, checking My Australian Records I see that Imran never took 12 in a Test against Australia. In 78-79, there was a truncated 2-Test series, where Imran took 7 Wickets( Sarfraz took 9-86 in Melbourne) and the series was tied 1-1. In 81-82, in a 3-test series, Imran had 16 wickets as Pakistan lost 2-1.
Faulty memory due to lack of Rava Thosai is the reason I messed up. I will be sure to check next time. Cheers!

Krishna Kumar, refer to Imran's excellent autobiography 'All Round View' (1988) for more info on how he developed as a fast bowler...basically he considered himself a good bat but then was regarded as a better bowler by the selectors...also took tips from John Snow and others at the county and World Series level which really helped him, but sadly he was struck down with back injury in his prime...

mm...playing with an untaped tennis ball is no fun at all...rubbish to bowl with, and no fun to bat with either...all you have to do is tap the ball and watch it sail for six...bounces too much as well... a tapeball doesn't bounce as much, comes through a lot faster, and swings when you rip some of the tape...good training for conventional swing...and yes, you have to bowl fast through the air to succeed on pakistani pitches; in england you have the weather and pitches helping you out, so the ball does seam...not so in pakistan...

but tapeball cricket is not so good for the batsmen...strokeplay isn't so important-if you can slog well, you're in...power matters a lot more in tapeball than hardball...

saying that, both are completely different games...in hard ball cricket the bowlers have to adjust to different lengths and put more effort in...the spinners get more purchase...while the batsmen must be technically better...

parking lot tapeball cricket also forces you to play down a little...if you hit in the air the ball goes outside and a lot of the time (for us, at least :P) you can't get it back...

oh and Feroz bhai, you were originally right-Imran took 12 wickets in the Sydney Test in the 76-77 Australia home series...which brought him into prominence...

Thank you, Nabeel for confirming that Sydney Test. My mistake was in checking from 77-78 onwards, not 76-77, the year 76 never entered my mind, oh well, those were the Days, now we have to wait 4 or 5 years for a crack at the Aussies, and then they'll stick us in Tasmania or Darwin or some Sheep Station...
I wonder what are the odds of seeing Farhat and Butt opening together in the First Test? ( Shades of Anwar and Sohail?) So help me if I see Malik open I will throw a fluffy tennis ball at my Sony TV!
Cheers and regards, Feroz.

Nabeel,

I know the book (Imran autobio), haven't read it though.

Batting with a regular tennis ball on a fairly big ground is not at all easy, because it will invariably not carry over the fence however well you hit it. Plus, most pitches are not so even, so playing with a regular tennis ball is not easy at all on the batsman.

On the other hand, playing with a regular tennis ball on a parking lot type pitch might mean the ball sitting up to be hit etc.

When I'm comparing taped ball and non-taped ball cricket, I'm comparing them on different surfaces, perhaps I should have made that clear. I'm assuming most cricket in India (at the informal level) is played on grounds (not so even pitches) with a regular tennis ball/rubber ball. And, in Pakistan, it's taped ball on tarred surfaces.

As far as I could tell, a taped ball once it started ripping, quickly became very difficult to bowl with, because you'd have tape hanging off it. Very tough I thought to maintain the same amount of rip for more than a bit.

I think btw, taping the ball was originally meant to protect the tennis ball, and then evolved into a game in itself.

One thing I will say definitely, is if you can bowl a good yorker with a regular tennis ball, bowling one with a taped tennis ball is very easy, because essentially, the skills involved are pretty much the same.