Bosanquet's Googly — Test Debut and the Birth of Wrist-Spin Variation

Bosanquet, the son of a Persian scholar and a French-Italian mother, was an unusual figure in English cricket. He was a fine fast-medium bowler at Oxford before he developed the googly; he had also represented Oxford at hammer-throwing and football. The 'bosie' was named almost immediately after him by Australian crowds, and the term is still used in Australian cricket vocabulary.

He took some time to control the delivery. In the 1902 Ashes he was not selected; by 1903 his county form was strong enough to win him a tour place under Plum Warner.

Warner's MCC tour was the first under official MCC auspices. Bosanquet's selection was controversial; he had taken 63 wickets in 1903 at 21 each but was thought too erratic. Warner, who had been Bosanquet's Oxford captain, backed him.

Bernard James Tindal Bosanquet, a Middlesex amateur educated at Eton and Oxford, had spent years working on a delivery he called 'the bosie' — a ball delivered with an apparent leg-break action but, by twisting the wrist over at the last moment, spinning the other way. He worked on the technique using a tennis ball on a billiards table, refining it through the late 1890s.

Bosanquet first used it in first-class cricket around 1900, but it was the 1903-04 Ashes tour to Australia that gave it a public stage. In the first Test at Sydney, he bowled Trumper with a delivery that swerved in, pitched on a length, and hit the off stump — Bosanquet later said it was the first true googly bowled in Australia. By the fourth Test at Sydney, he took six for 51 in the second innings, bowling England to a 157-run win and securing the Ashes.

The googly transformed slow bowling. Reggie Schwarz, an Englishman playing club cricket with Bosanquet at Middlesex, learned the technique and took it back to South Africa. Within four years (by the 1907 SA tour of England) South Africa had four wrist-spinners — Schwarz, Aubrey Faulkner, Gordon White and Bert Vogler — all using the googly, and the team's bowling identity changed accordingly.

“It is not unfair, only immoral.”

“Bosanquet bowled with great success, frequently puzzling the batsmen.”

Bosanquet's Test career was short — only seven matches, 25 wickets at 24.16 — but his impact was incalculable. He retired from regular county cricket by 1908 and devoted himself to writing and business. His son Reginald became a famous television newsreader in Britain in the 1970s.

In Australia, Bosanquet is sometimes credited (or blamed) for the long line of leg-spin and wrist-spin bowlers, from Mailey through O'Reilly to Benaud and Warne, all of whom used the wrong'un — a direct descendant of the original 'bosie'.