5 Bowlers and their success with the knuckle ball in IPL 2017

The advent of Twenty20 cricket was once considered the death of the bowlers. Many former bowlers have frustratingly said that it is better off to have bowling machines instead of bowlers due to the imbalance between bat and ball in today’s day and age.

The modern-day bowlers have come up with new variations to stop the batsmen from running away with the show. Shaun Pollock invented the slower bouncer, which is a common sight in cricket these days especially in the shortest format of the game. Innovations like these have restored some balance between bat and ball.

One such delivery has been the knuckle ball which was on show on a regular basis in IPL 2017. Former South African pacer Charl Langeveldt was a great exponent of this delivery. He passed on the knowledge to Zaheer Khan during the IPL of 2010 and since then the knowledge has emanated amongst the Indian bowlers.

Let us have a look at 5 bowlers who were highly successful with the knuckle ball in the tenth edition of the IPL:

1. Zaheer Khan

The first memory of Zaheer unleashing this delivery goes back to the World Cup 2011 when he cleaned up Michael Hussey in India’s quarter-final triumph against Australia. Since then Zak has used this bowl regularly in international cricket and this IPL was no different.

Aged 38, Zaheer did not have the body to bowl as fast as he used to. This prompted the left-armer to bowl a lot of knuckle balls this year. The bewildering aspect of Zaheer’s knuckle ball for the batsmen is that his arm speed does not change at all. Apart from that, Zaheer has the ability to bowl it with a great seam position, identical of an outswinger to the right-handed batsmen, which further makes it hard to pick the variation.

Kedhar Jadhav was foxed by the old horse’s knuckle ball in this year’s 5th game as he got too early into the shot to hit the ball straight to long off. Zaheer has got the best in the business out with his smart variation.