Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/44

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DEVELOPMENT
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singular. He would bring it from under his arm by a twist, and nearly as high as his armpit, and with this action push it, as it were, from him. How it was that the balls acquired the velocity they did by this mode of delivery I never could comprehend."

With all our respect for the old chronicler it is not easy to follow this description. No human being could produce a fast ball by a push from the armpit, but probably David Harris and several others did not stick to real underhand bowling. The best lob bowler I ever saw was V. E. Walker. Nobody could call V. E. Walker's bowling strictly underhand, and if I have been correctly informed Clarke's was not either; but lob bowling is classified as underhand, and it certainly is not round-arm. In the case of V. E. Walker the arm was slightly bent and a little raised. In strict underhand bowling the hand and elbow are in a straight vertical line; but if the arm is bent in such a way that the elbow is outside and the hand swung slightly away from the body the result may not be round-arm bowling, nor is it real underhand like A. W. Ridley, W. M. Rose, or Osbert Mordaunt.