Jack Iverson's mystery grip
Everyone is talking abt Ajanta Mendis's mysterious bowling but he is not the only one bowling like that. Jack Iverson who played for Australia back in 1950 was a similar type of bowler.
It is commonly said that nothing in cricket occurs for the first time. Players reset statistical benchmarks, of course & attain new standards of excellence. But styles & theories of batting, bowling, fielding & captaincy allegedly exist in a cycle of creative reinvention, endlessly echoing those gone before. The former Australian captain Victor Richardson used to tell his grandsons, the brothers Chappell: "Don't believe taht anything is new in Cricket. It's all tried before....If you hang onto a suit long enough it will come back into favour."
Fifty years ago, however, there appeared a tall, shy, shambling Australian named Jack Iverson who challenged this verity. He bowled like no man before & a mere handful since, clasping the ball snugly between the thumb and a folded middle finger as though giving it a secret handshake. And extending that middle finger while maintaining the fulcrum of the opposable thumb turned cricket physics on its head; from the same grip, with slight alterations of the arm's angle at release, Iverson bowled top spinners & wrong ones that looked like leg breaks, leg breaks that resembled off breaks. If slow bowling is the art of deceit, Iverson rankswith the perpetrators of greatest forgeries in history.
They called him, allusively, a 'mystery spinner', nicknamed him 'The Freak'.And when he routed England in a test in Sydney in January of 1951, Jack Iverson & his spin bowling sub-genre of one became the sensations of their time. " He has skill extraordinary and the demeanour of a thoughtful player," wrote English journalist John Kay. " His like come seldom. When they arrive, every effort should be made to keep them on the scene!" But stay he did not. Within a few years, all that remained of Jack Iverson in cricket's annals were memories, statistics & a few fading photographs of that impossible grip.
Comet-like cricket careers are themselves not unusual in Australian cricket; about 4 in 10 players in its record books have played no more than 5 tests. Usually it is because Test cricket's unique demands strech them beyond their talent & temperament, or because form deserts them at inopportune moments, or because rivals of similar ability are in abundance. But again, none of this applied to Iverson. For the seven years from his unannouced appearance in sub-district ranks to the end of his first-class career, he was perhaps the world's most destructive bowler, harvesting in all classes of cricket more than 500 wickets at a cost of just over 12 runs each. He headed the bowling averages in Brighton's premiership season of 1947-48, then in Melbourne's of 1948-49. The following season he headed the Sheffield Shield averages and First-class averages on an undefeated Australian tour of New Zealand. Finally he led the test averages in a 4-1 Ashes victory in 1950-51.
After a handful of further first-class matches, however, Iverson faded from view, like a line of handwriting where the ink has unexpectedly petered out. The bowler whom Keith Miller & Richie Benaud still believe would have dissolved batsmen on contact in English conditions never went there, preferring to become a suburban estate agent collecting rents & pacing out frontages. He died young, at fifty eight, in apparently benighted circumstances, and considering himself a "broken-down old cricketer" whom "no-one remembered".
Jack Iverson
Australia
Player profile
Full name John Brian Iverson
Born July 27, 1915, Melbourne, Victoria
Died October 24, 1973, Brighton, Victoria (aged 58 years 89 days)
Major teams Australia, Victoria
Batting style Right-hand bat
Bowling style Legbreak googly
Batting and fielding averages Mat Inns NO Runs HS Ave 100 50 4s 6s Ct St
Tests 5 7 3 3 1* 0.75 0 0 0 0 2 0
First-class 34 46 27 277 31* 14.57 0 0 13 0
Bowling averages Mat Inns Balls Runs Wkts BBI BBM Ave Econ SR 4w 5w 10
Tests 5 8 1108 320 21 6/27 6/52 15.23 1.73 52.7 2 1 0
First-class 34 8878 3019 157 7/77 19.22 2.04 56.5 9 1
Career statistics Test debut Australia v England at Brisbane, Dec 1-5, 1950 scorecard
Last Test Australia v England at Melbourne, Feb 23-28, 1951 scorecard
First-class span 1949/50 - 1953/54
Profile
John Brian Iverson, who died in Melbourne on October 24, aged 58, was an unusual bowler who created something of a sensation during a brief career in Australian cricket. He bowled fast when at school, but took no part in cricket for twelve years afterwards. While on Army service in New Guinea, Big Jack, as he was known, developed a peculiar method of spinning the ball, which he gripped between his thumb and middle finger. This enabled him to bowl a wide variety of deliveries, including off-breaks, leg-breaks and googlies, without any change of action. He first attracted attention in big cricket in 1949-50 when he took 46 wickets for Victoria at an average cost of 16.12. In the following autumn with W. A. Brown"s team in New Zealand, he, in all matches, disposed of 75 batsmen at a cost of seven runs each and in the next Australian season, at the age of 35, he was chosen for his country against the England team captained by F. R. Brown. So perplexing did the visiting batsmen find the bowling of this tall man that in the Test series he obtained 21 wickets for 15.73 runs apiece, including six for 27 in the second innings of the third Test at Sydney. During the fourth Test at Adelaide he suffered an ankle injury when he trod on the ball. He played in only one game in each of the next two seasons and then gave up cricket altogether. Family commitments and his job in managing a real estate agency resulted in him disappearing from the first class cricket scene in 1951. However, he again played for Australia in three unofficial "Tests" played by a 1953-54 Commonwealth team. He later became a commentator for ABC radio.
In his early 50s Iverson developed atherosclerosis of the brain, which caused him to suffer from recurrent depression. He committed suicide with a gunshot wound to the chest aged 58.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack
Nicknamed "Big Jake" and "Wrong-Grip Jake", Iverson's unique style caused Australian captain Lindsay Hassett, a fellow Victorian, to hide his action during training sessions for the national team. Hassett prohibited Iverson from bowling to New South Wales batsmen to prevent them from analysing his bowling action, making him more effective in Sheffield Shield matches for Victoria against New South Wales. This led to conflict with New South Wales batsmen. When Iverson was put on to bowl during the Tests, Hassett would remove Keith Miller, a New South Welshman, from his position at first slip and move him to mid on, so that he was standing behind Iverson and could not understand how Iverson's bowling action worked.
He explained his action thus:
I woke up to the fact that whichever direction I had my thumb pointing so would the ball break. .. If my thumb was pointed to the left or offside as I let the ball go, the result would be legbreak. If it pointed to the right or legside the result would be a wrong'un. If it pointed directly at the batsmen, it would be a topspinner.
His style was praised by one of his contemporaries, fellow Australian leg spinner Richie Benaud and national captain, who stated
"There have been plenty of spin bowlers around for more than a hundred years but the four, for me, who have broken the mould and made batsmen think seriously about what was coming down the pitch at them, have been Bernard Bosanquet, Jack Iverson, John Gleeson and Shane Warne."
in reference to Iverson's innovation which changed about spin bowling thinking among the cricket community
