Since all the deliveries we are discussing here are unplayable ones, I think the onus should be on the skill and wizardry of the bowler rather than the the technique and the temperament of the batsman. As in who's or which delivery takes/took more skill set to execute given the condition of the pitch, the nature of the crowd and the sheer magnitude of the occasion? And more importantly which one casts a lasting impression on you over the other. The ball of the century must be unique, revolutionary.
People talk about technique LIKE THEY OWN ONE! If technique is everything, if we could play cricket the same way as we talk, I think we might as well play cricket out there in space, in zero-gravity. Can You Imagine little Tendulkar taking guard against a Steyn or a Mcgrath dressed-up like rookie astronauts? And a Jonty Rhodes doing a Somersault in mid air, in an attempt to catch the great Sachin, while doing a George Clooney impression of his own, from Alfonso Curaon's "Gravity?" Lets be a Nolan and "think it over a little." Jonty Rhodes, Steyn, Mcgrath and Tendulkar all in one motion? Hmm. I think team Reebok would be intrested in that.(Note: They might as well include Ajinkya Rahane too, the current world record holder of 8 catches in a test match)
Jokes apart, lets get to the business end and talk cricket and nothing but cricket. I think to call a ball "the ball of the century" for starters, the batsman has to be competitive enough to make adjustments and hence no mere pushovers. Which explains why one can't consider Akram's delivery to Robert Croft all that seriously. Which explains why we can't afford to be easily seduced by all those unplayable yorkers that gets the better off the tailenders 9 times out of 10. Those ones should not be in contention here since we get to see them every now and then, both in the past and in the present. And more importantly they are delivered at lesser skilled batsmen.
More often than not in discussions such as this, I've seen people confusing mere "unplayable deliveries" with "ball of the century." Not all unplayable deliveries, barring a collective few, remain in our memory for an eternity. And not all are undeniably great. Can you call Michael Vaughn's spinning cobra that took off from a pitch mine to Tendulkar, great? It is good, no doubt about it(meaning you gotta be good to pitch it in there) but still there is an element of luck involved in it. Especially with the bowler being Vaughn, not Warne, and the pitch playing a few tricks of its own in-order to flummox the batsman. Same with the ones that darts along the ground and aims for the stump camera. Or those that took off from a good length, simply because the pitch was deteriorating. Sreesanth's bouncer to Kallis? Bang on! Although, in recent times, there has been quite a few unplayable ones that has captured our imagination unlike anything. Last week we heard what another reader has to say about Waqar's vicious inswinging or was it reverse swinging? Yorker that out-foxed Lara and had him prostrated. He voted it above Warne's dancing legbreak to Gatting and he was of the viewpoint that to call a ball as the greatest of'em all you got to have both ends balanced - meaning a great facing off another great - instead of a slightly lopsided scenario where a Warne has a slightly weaker foe in Mike Gatting(More on that later). Gatting would be cringing by now and understandably so but thats not even the whole point. He was looking at it from a batsman's point of view and me from the bowlers. Why? For I genuinely feel its the bowler's skill that earns him a wicket not the batsman's error. The error might induce the edge but for the edge to come, as a bowler you would have to be really stubborn and work on a plan. Which, like, Virat Kohli Mentioned a few days ago might be to ball outside off stump and lure the batsman on to a false stroke. There are cases to the contrary - like a Tendulkar getting out to a Ray Price fulltoss or an Ashley Giles longhop - but those are rarest of rare ones. This is more so in case of greatest of them all dismissals. The batsmen could do little about it but for bowlers it takes incredible skillset to produce such moments in hiatus. Which they did mind you.
In my time, I was privileged enough to watch some of the greatest fast bowlers taking on some of the greatest batsmen, of their respective era. Warne and Murali. Mcgrath, Akram, Waqar, Donald. For a recent generation, Jimmy Anderson and Dale Steyn(There is still speculation on whether who's the better bowler among Dale or Jimmy?). On their day, bowlers like Shane Bond, Andrew Flintoff, Brett Lee, Shoaib Akthar, Stuart broad, Lasith Malinga, Saeed Ajmal, Saqlain Mushtaq, Harbhajan Singh, Ajantha Mendis and even Ravichandran Ashwin could be lethal. I know enough that Ashwin and on a greater note the nowhere to be seen Mendis, are mere rookies compared to legends like Warne and Murali but still on their day, given the surface, they could rip you apart and run you ragged.(Still unconvinced about Ashwin? Have a look at his carrom ball that left a certain Mr. Hashim Amla clueless!)
Ryan Harris to Alestair Cook was a good one. Dale Steyn to Cheteshwar Pujara. Jimmy Anderson setting up Tendulkar was worthy of a revisit. Loved the way Flintoff set up Ponting in Ashes 2005, I think it was one of the great spells of all time. But still, there is something that eludes all of them from being genuine contenders isn't there? Just the sheer resonance perhaps. Or something else.
I belong to a different era so I can't really comment on what Thommo did to Geoff Boycott or what Dennis Lillee or Michael Holding or Andy Roberts or Malcom Marshall, produced to all those poor souls who had the misfortune(or fortune) to be at the other end when these men of fury struck with furious anger and literally, castled the stumps. We already had the best in the business - both experts, geeks and literary freaks - strutting their pen in espncricinfo's cricket monthly on that, in an ode to summarize the material in the best way possible. All of them eloquent. All objective. And all of them did their best to summarize/revisit the said moment in time, in a way that was vicarious to the core. You come out reading, having felt as if you've been transported to the place, to the blissful occassion, that was once and for all the holy grail of greatness. And unlike the stand up comic/twitterati Vikram Sathye once quipped "I think half of Sachin's sucesss is Tony Gregg's" - none of it were flashy and/or over the top.
Would love to know what Bhogle has to say about it or Manjeraker or even Ponting or Ian Chappell. Those are some of the best in the business too - they've seen more cricket than I have - and I'm sure they would be in aggrement with me when I made the choices that I have. One way or the other.
Some of the key variables that people omit while discussing the greatest ball of the century are the magnitude of the occasion and the sheer resonance of the "mode of play"(I'm being rather euphemistic here). For instance, on what is unofficially dubbed as the ball of the century by many groups I.e., Shane warne's legbreak to Gatting, Wisden called it in their Almanac that "never, perhaps, has one delivery cast so long a shadow over a game, or a series".
There couldn't have been a better occassion to deliver that ball and unlike my fellow reader who inboxed about it the other day calling it a travesty, I don't think it was all that lopsided.
Garfield Sobers would only talk like how Sobers knows how to talk. He perhaps thinks everybody in his team is a Garfield sobers and that at times, lead to his downfall.
It was a packed house. Mike Gatting was the batsman, who I think was at the time both averaged and aged at the mid thirties. It was not Warne's fault that Gatting was past his prime by then and that he didn't get to deliver the same ball against a Graham Gooch or a Kevin Petersen. There wasn't many who could tackle that ball and especially at the time. The ball was great and lets give credits to warne, where due.
In sport, people tend to get remembered for their misdeeds rather than the countless occasions when they've done something right. In Gatting's case he's mostly remembered for two occasions - the stupid reverse-sweep he played in the 87 world cup final to forfeit the match to australia and the one featuring Warne, five years later. Both are dismissals ironically and while one was clearly Gatting's fault(dare if you ask which one) the other one wasn't.
Warne, a rookie to the cricketing fraternity by then, has only played a handful of of test matches and no way you could say that he was out-matching Gatting. This is unlike Wasim Akram who was clearly the better exponent of swing bowling than anybody else at the time, when he dismissed Dravid, a young looking Dravid, in that iconic Chennai test of 1998-99 with a peach of a delivery. Akram's own antics in the 1992 world cups would merit countless viewings too but to cover that completely you would require another space altogether.
Personally, I'm fanboy of what Warne did to gatting all those years ago. You could never get tired of raving about it - the way it came out of his hand, the vision, the revs, the drift, the pace, the angle - everything fell into its place. You have to be a monk not to be seduced by it and Gatting certainly wasn't one. Its greatness however lies in the fact that it not only floored everyone but also reinvented a lost art to the game. The art called leg spin. Shane Warne literally flourished from there on into a cricketing legacy and even though he did flirt that with his own subsequent versions of the ball of the century time again - the one against Strauss and another against Chanderpaul - not ignoring all those countless behind your legs dismissals(shall we call them nut-megs?) neither he nor the game has witnessed anything quite like it. For me, it's the cricketing equivalent of Bechkham's long ranger(is that even a lonranger?) that fooled Sullivan in the late 90's that literally opened up realms of endless possibilities in sport. Gatting ain't no Bradman but he wasn't a Mark Ramprakash either. As it turns out, Both Bechkham and Warne, remains in my memory as pure bliss of the 1990's:) When Warne flirted with greatness over Liz Hurley? He was quite at its peak for the right reasons of course. So, folks, if somebody ask you which is the best Ball of the century? Say Shane Warne to Gatting, Ashes 1992. Period. End of story.
