The Googly: How Bernard Bosanquet Taught the Leg-Break to Lie

Most deliveries in cricket announce themselves. A fast bowler’s run-up, the seam, the angle of the arm: batters read these signs and respond. The googly is a delivery designed to defeat that reading. It is bowled by a right-arm leg-spinner and turns the opposite way to his normal leg-break, from off to leg against a right-handed batter, yet it leaves the hand looking almost identical. It was first used in a serious match in July 1900, and in the years since it has become one of the standard weapons of wrist-spin.

A tabletop game and a lunchtime trick

The man usually credited with it is Bernard Bosanquet, born on 13 October 1877 at Bulls Cross, Enfield, in Middlesex. By his own account the idea began in the mid-1890s with a tabletop game called Twisti-Twosti, in which a ball had to be spun so that it curled away from where the opponent expected. He carried the idea onto a tennis ball and then a cricket ball, and by about 1899 he was bowling it in lunch-interval games at Oxford, where it was something of a star turn.

Care is needed with the word invented. Other bowlers had occasionally produced a ball that turned the wrong way by accident, and Attewell and E. R. Wilson are named among those who dismissed batters that way. Some accounts push the idea back into the 1880s. What Bosanquet added was control. He could do it on purpose, repeatedly, and with enough accuracy to build a plan around it. That is the difference between a freak delivery and a weapon.

The first wicket

The first public success came in July 1900, when Middlesex met Leicestershire at Lord's. Samuel Coe, a Leicestershire batter who had reached 98, was dismissed by Bosanquet's new ball. Bosanquet also made a first-innings 136 in the match, so it was a good match to be remembered for. He first bowled the delivery against Australians in 1902 at Lord's, in a couple of overs late on an evening, and in early 1903 he is linked with the first googly bowled in Australia, to the great batter Victor Trumper.

The word googly itself became common around 1903. Its origin is uncertain, and one standard dictionary calls it dubious. In Australia the ball was called the Bosie, after its inventor, and the wrong ‘un, a name that has outlived both.

How it works

A leg-break is delivered with the wrist cocked and the back of the hand facing roughly towards the batter at release; the fingers and wrist roll across the ball so that it spins in a direction that makes it turn from leg to off for a right-hander. For a googly the bowler bends the wrist sharply from that leg-break position, so the seam and spin axis end up tilted the other way. Another method is to deliver what looks like a leg-break and add extra spin with the fingers just before release.

Bosanquet himself put it in blunt terms, saying that the googly is nothing more nor less than an ordinary off-break. That is the point. The ball behaves like an off-spinner’s delivery, but it comes from the hand of a leg-spinner whose wrist and arm position look like the leg-break the batter expects. The only clue is the hand at the point of release, and a batter has very little time to use it. A batter who has picked the wrong spin plays for turn away and finds it coming in, towards the pads and the stumps.

Seven Tests and a lasting mark

Bosanquet's own Test career was short. He played seven Tests for England between 1903 and 1905, taking 25 wickets at 24.16 with a best return of 8 for 107 in the first Test of 1905, at Trent Bridge in Nottingham. His highest Test score was 27 and he scored 147 runs at an average of 13.36 in all. His last Test began on 5 July 1905. In first-class cricket he played 235 matches and took 629 wickets at 23.80.

The numbers understate his effect. In 1905 at Trent Bridge he took eight of the nine wickets to fall in the second innings. Some Edwardian onlookers regarded the delivery as unsporting, even as cheating, a reaction that shows how new the idea felt.

The game learns to bowl it

Once a bowler had shown the way, others copied. Gregor McGregor and Plum Warner recognised the potential early, and Warner’s writing helped spread the news. The most striking result came in South Africa. The lesson was plain: the delivery was most dangerous in a team with more than one bowler who could use it.

Since then the googly has become a normal part of wrist-spin. Modern leg-spinners bowl it as a variation within an over, mixing it with the leg-break, the flipper and the top-spinner so the batter has to guess which is coming. Left-arm unorthodox spin has its own history of surprise, long known as the chinaman.

Why it still matters

The googly’s real contribution is a principle rather than a particular ball. It showed that spin could be a matter of deception as much as turn: a bowler does not have to turn the ball a lot if the batter has been persuaded to expect something else. Bosanquet died on 12 October 1936, aged 58, at Wykehurst in Surrey. His son Reginald later became a well-known television newsreader. The delivery his father learned from a tabletop game is still being bowled, and still bluffing batters, more than a century later.