There is a pejorative term that has entered the lexicon of cricket. Or at least, there is a term, always a part of that lexicon, that has gradually been transposed into pejorative.
No skill within the game has been diminished more than that of the medium pacer. Batsmen are stylish or thunderous, deft and wristy, elegant craftsmen of the willow.
Pace bowlers lend excitement, spinners are wily or mysterious. But the medium pacer is regularly traduced as a dibbly?dobbler, a guileless purveyor of there?or?thereabouts makeshift occasionals.
Read the justification for the new toss-less playing condition in county cricket this season, and it stems in no small part from the idea that medium pacers have become a blot on the cricket landscape.
Without beating about the bush, the critics are talking about Jesse Ryder, who in the past two seasons for Essex has trundled in, wobbled the ball about a bit, and taken 89 wickets at 22 runs apiece. The sacrilege of it.
Let me tell you a story. In 1969 the University of Manchester cricket team travelled to Bradford to play that university at the old Park Avenue ground.
It had been a damp week or so and by then the pitch was virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the square, apart that is for one part, the like of which I had never seen before nor since.
Around five paces from the crease at the football stand end was a strip, perhaps two feet long and no more than four inches wide, that was totally devoid of grass, as if the turf had been scooped out.
“What happened here?” we asked the groundsman. “Tom Cartwright happened,” he replied.
Warwickshire had just played and beaten Yorkshire, and from 39.4 overs Cartwright had match figures of 12 for 55. So relentlessly had he pitched the ball on the same patch of turf that he had knocked the top clean away.
There was a time, you see, when the genuine medium pacer, rather than someone who just turned their arm over as a fill-in, was a unique part of English cricket, a type of bowler totally adapted to the conditions, and of his type Cartwright was a genius. He had a short bouncing run, with a drop of the head just before a high leap into his delivery stride.
The action was high and wristy, and his front foot hammered down, lending extra snap to the delivery. Those who believe the elusive “nip” to be a function of pace have never watched Cartwright in action: he hit the bat teeth-jarringly hard.
Accuracy was merciless, with a ring of close fielders and the keeper standing up claustrophobically. Cartwright could make the ball gabble with a hint of swing or cut, or change of pace, and it brought him 1,536 wickets at an average of 19.11, all at a shade over two runs per over.
There were 94 five-wicket hauls. I played once in a match at Arundel with him, against New Zealand in 1978, on a slow bleached pitch that offered nothing to bowlers. He was 43 then and a few years retired with a shoulder condition.
But he came on to bowl six overs, and suddenly batting became fraught as the ball performed dutifully for him as it refused to do for others: it was an education.
Just once, in a 40-over Sunday league match at Weston-super-Mare, when the Kent opener Brian Luckhurst, in making 142, decided to lap him down a stiff breeze, and Cartwright’s eight overs conceded 77 runs, did anyone ever really clobber him.
A lot of what we saw from the young Ian Botham came from his Somerset Cartwright tutorials: try telling Beefy that Tom was a dibbly-dobbler.
Then try telling the same to any who played against or watched Derek Shackleton hold down an end for Hampshire for 21 years.
If Cartwright was what we might call a blue-collar bowler, then “the perennial Shack” as he became known carried a more aristocratic air. Nothing he did on the field was less than immaculate, from his perfect flannels and brushed brilliantined hair to his length and line.
Shackleton had an upright trot to the crease, a textbook action that included a loose wrist cocked at 90 degrees which helped give the ball the extra flick that sends the seam spinning backwards and holds it upright, all exacerbated with the aid of a whippy arm.
Like Cartwright, he moved the ball either way, in the air or from the pitch, not extravagantly but sufficiently, with an infinite variety of subtleties. His record is just astonishing, for no bowler has taken more wickets than he since the second world war and only six bowlers, spinners all, have more than his career total of 2,857, taken at 18.65 each.
He took more than 100 wickets in each season from 1949, the year he first established himself in the Hampshire side, to 1968, the year before he retired, and included were 194 five-wicket hauls, and 38 10-wicket matches.
Would the pair have got “twatted”, as players would have it, or could they have survived in this modern age of powerbats, and uninhibited hitting?
The much-derided success of Ryder suggests they could flourish in this country still.
These were brilliant bowlers, capable of adapting to the circumstances, especially when pace off the ball is such a crucial element of white-ball cricket now. It is just that in the pursuit of pace pure and simple, and the need to hit the crease hard, theirs has become a lost art.