The Yorker

GH on the origins of the cricket's deadliest delivery

Gideon Haigh

Did you see it?  Not many single deliveries qualify for must-see status straight away, but the fifth ball of Jasprit Bumrah’s seventh over in Visakhapatnam yesterday surely did.  Again, Bumrah cantered in to his final gallop.  Again, Bumrah’s arm hyperextended like a kevlar mast on maxi yacht.  Halfway down, the ball was on a seventh stump line, but it came back with the angle and the swing to spread-eagle Ollie Pope’s middle and leg stumps.  So did Bumrah set off the crucial charge in a controlled detonation of England’s first innings.

Trailing off, Pope irritatedly punched the back of his bat, as though he had somehow contributed to the dismissal; really, he contributed no more than an onlooker to a traffic accident.  It would almost have been a shame otherwise, for cricket spectacle scales few heights greater than speed’s precision scattering of stumps.  A candidate for ball of the (twenty-first) century?  Certainly a tour de force in that essential and compelling delivery, the yorker.

The yorker need not hit the stumps to arrest the eye: Mitchell Starc’s excruciating full-pitch in Brisbane to Shamar Joseph was a show stopper, if not for long.  But no coup de grace seems so final as the ball darting beneath and below a late-arriving bat to disarrange a wicket: think of the succession of Patrick Eagar photographs at The Oval in 1976, where Michael Holding’s rendered England’s order as helpless as the blind-folded victims of a firing squad.  One sees the vulnerable backs of their heads, the helpless toes of their bats, the stumps scattered every which way, like pins in an alley.

Accentuating this is a cognisance that the yorker is a difficult delivery to bowl consistently, and even itself vulnerable, given its minuscule margin for error.  The yorker used to be a staple of the closing overs of ODIs; paradoxically, because six to nine inches either way can produce either a low full-toss or a long half-volley, it is used more sparingly in T20.  Jarrod noted a few years ago the tendency to imbue the yorker with magical powers.  Bowling at the death?  Bowl more yorkers.  Economising through the middle?  More and more yorkers.  Seeking to arrest climate change?  Get it up the blockhole. When a batter pongos an attempted yorker, nonetheless, the bowler looks a bit of a dupe.

Another thing not to underestimate about the yorker?  You’ve got to love its name: so familiar, so evocative, so versatile.  A batter is yorked (past participle).  A bowler seeks to york (verb).  A ball is yorking (gerund).  Plus, of course, the general assumption that its origins lie in a noun, for Yorkshire.  As AG Steel concludes in the Badminton volume on Cricket (1888): ‘We can find no derivation for the word ‘yorker’, but are told that it came from the Yorkshiremen; who were fonder of bowling this ball than any other.’

Cricket terminology, however, is a complex matter, particularly in the days where language was more local, more nuanced.  Michael Rundell speculates in The Wisden Dictionary of Cricket (2006) that the geographic explanation owes something to the ‘well-attested connection….between the word “Yorkshire” and “york” and the notion of cheating or deception.’  Rundell cites Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) as including the phrase ‘to come Yorkshire over someone’, meaning to decide them.  To ‘york’ or ‘put Yorkshire on someone’ are then defined in the English Dialect Dictionary (1905) as meaning ‘to cheat, trick or overreach a person.’

This, however, depends on the idea that the yorker is a particularly deceptive delivery, in the same way as it seems ‘Chinaman’ was used as early as the 1920s to describe a delivery of oriental wickedness originated by the Yorkshire slow bowlers Abe Waddington and Roy Kilner.  I’m not sure it is, all that.  And a few years ago, as you do, I was reading an edition of the memoirs of the New South Wales premier Joseph Carruthers, a liberal and federalist.  It contains a lot of politics, a lot of cricket, and their intersection. Most of the major political figures of the time turn out to have been cricket fanatics: from future prime ministers Edmund Barton and George Reid, to premiers in waiting James McGowen and John Storey.  Conservative Carruthers and socialist Storey were political rivals who sunk their differences in the parliamentary team of the day: ‘Many a time Storey and I, batting together, put up a winning score. There were other men of different shades of political belief in the cricket team, and I can say them as I say of Storey and myself, that the bitterness of party strife disappeared during contact with one another in the cricket field.’

Carruthers’ explication of ‘the Yorker’ entwined two University teammates, Yorkshire-born Joe Coates (‘a wonderful left-arm bowler, with a puzzling spin and delivery’) and New Zealand-born Dick Teese (‘a fine player on the offside’).

“Coates was a Yorkshireman by birth. Dick Teese (our University wicketkeeper) was an inveterate wag, christening every man with some apt nickname.  So he called Coates ‘York’. Now Coates’s most deadly ball was a fast creaser, suddenly bowled after part of an over of spins or breaks at medium pace. That fast creaser took scores of wickets, so Teece called it a ‘Yorker’ and it had become a cricketing term in universal vogue. Often when fielding close to the wickets I used to hear Teece say: ‘York him, Joe. York him.’ In later years, when I was president of the NSW Cricketing Association, and it fell to my lot to entertain visiting English teams, I used to ask men like Warner, Douglas and others if they knew the origin of the term ‘a Yorker’. They confessed they did not know, and were surprised to learn how it originated.”

The only trouble with this elegant explanation is that Coates did not get to Sydney until 1864, when he became a teacher at Newington, ahead of a distinguished career in education, and there were in the next six years no English tours of Australia when he might have been seen by a visiting cricketer.  Why does this matter?  Because it’s October 1870 that features the earliest significant use of the word ‘yorker’ in print, in Baily’s Magazine: ‘Their [Surrey’s] new bowler, Anstead, who hails from Mitcham, is a really good man…He is fast and straight, and not unfrequently delivers that useful kind of ball known as a Yorker.  And a fast Yorker is as disagreeable a first ball as an incoming batsman could receive.’

The likelihood is, then, that the term ‘yorker’ developed along similar lines on opposite sides of the world, converging over the next decade while obscuring its provenance. In a Punch cartoon in September 1882, a ‘Sporting Old Parson’ asks a ‘Professional Player’: ‘Why is a ball like that called a ‘Yorker’, Sir?’ Replies the ‘Professional Player’: ‘Well, I can’t say, Sir. I don’t know what else you would call it.’ Shades of Tom Emmett, another Victorian age cricket giant, and the ‘sostenutor’ - his expression, for the ball pitching leg and hitting off, that lacked yorker’s staying power.  ‘What else would you call it?’ Emmett asked famously.  But only he, it seems, ever called it that…..

Since then, of course, the word ‘yorker’ has spread all over the world, albeit sometimes in arrears of the delivery.  In his autobiography, Wasim Akram described bowling at the death in his first one-day international forty years ago, and being counselled by his captain Zaheer Abbas to keep Jeremy Coney quiet by bowling ‘yorkers’. Callow Wasim had never heard the word, and would not grasp the delivery until coached in it by Imran Khan: later, of course, he became, with his teammate Waqar Younis, a superb exponent.  It many masters have ranged from West Indies’ Joel Garner to Sri Lanka’s Lasith Malinga; its many pupils now include just about every pace bowler in the Indian Premier League.

As that Baily’s citation evinces, however, the yorker has always had destructive associations, with the idea that the ball gains in menace from maximising its time before pitching.  As early as 1897, in The Encyclopedia of Sport (1897), the great English fast bowler Tom Richardson was noting: ‘Two variations of the ‘yorker’ demand a word; cricketers know them as the ‘curling yorker’ and the ‘running-away ball’.  Both of these curl in the air before touching the ground, the first from the off, the second from the leg.’  With the former definition, Richardson could have been describing Bumrah’s sublime delivery.  Did you see it?  I’m not sure Ollie Pope did.