Underarm, roundarm and overarm: the long fight over the bowling arm.

Underarm, and the first ban on roundarm

The historian Martin Williamson, in his account of the evolution of bowling for ESPNcricinfo (27 May 2006), starts from the point that all bowling was originally underarm. Bowlers who brought the arm out to the side, a style called roundarm, met resistance: Williamson says the Laws were changed in 1816 to ban roundarm and let umpires call it a no ball.

The best-known casualty was John Willes. Williamson writes that Willes, bowling roundarm for Kent against the MCC at Lord's on 15 July 1822, was no-balled, threw the ball down, rode away and never played another major match.

Who invented roundarm?

There is a well-known story and there are doubts about it:

• The sister's skirt. A popular story credits Willes's sister Christiana (often spelt Christina) with the style: her wide skirt stopped her bowling underarm to him in the garden, so she bowled with her arm out to the side.
• The doubt. John Major, in his cricket history More Than A Game, doubts the story on the ground that hooped skirts were out of fashion at the time, according to Wikipedia.
• An earlier name. Other accounts, also reported by Wikipedia, credit Tom Walker of Hambledon with bowling roundarm decades earlier.

We saw these versions only through Wikipedia, so none of them is confirmed here.

Roundarm made legal, in two steps

Williamson says roundarm spread through the 1820s, and that by 1826 Sussex were winning with two roundarm bowlers, James Broadbridge and William Lillywhite. The Laws then moved in two stages. Williamson records that the MCC let bowlers raise the hand to elbow height in 1828, and rewrote the Laws in 1835 to allow roundarm deliveries.

Which of those years counts as the legalisation depends on the source. Some sources treat 1835, with the hand allowed to shoulder height, as the moment roundarm became legal. Wisden's Ken Myhill, as cited in secondary summaries, gives 1828, with the hand at elbow height. Both steps happened; the dispute is over which one to call the change.

Williamson also notes that in 1845 the MCC changed the Laws to make umpires' decisions final.

The Oval, 26 August 1862

The next step was the arm above the shoulder. Williamson describes the moment it came to a head. On 26 August 1862, at The Oval, Edgar Willsher bowled with his arm above the shoulder and was no-balled six times in a row by the umpire John Lillywhite. The England professionals walked off, and play ended for the day. According to Wikipedia, Lillywhite was the son of William Lillywhite, one of the roundarm pioneers.

Accounts disagree, in a small way, about the name of the fixture: some call it Surrey against All England and others England against Surrey. The date and the ground are the same in every account.

The 1864 Law

Wikipedia, in a search summary, says MCC members debated a change in 1863 but most voted against it; we could not confirm that. The ICC's history dates the legalisation of overarm bowling to 1864, and Williamson says the MCC changed the Laws for the 1864 season so that a bowler could do anything except throw the ball. Wikipedia gives the day of the amendment as 10 June 1864; we found no MCC page giving the day, so it is unconfirmed.

The old styles did not disappear at once. Williamson says roundarm and even underarm bowlers were still seen in first-class cricket well into the 20th century. Underarm also appeared much later: the MCG's timeline records that on 1 February 1981, in the third World Series Cup final, Greg Chappell told his brother Trevor to bowl underarm to New Zealand's last batter.

Throwing, and the 15-degree limit

Once overarm was legal, the line the Laws drew was between bowling and throwing. The ICC's history records that its 1966 meeting redefined a "throw".

The modern rule is in the ICC Illegal Bowling Regulations, effective 1 July 2018. They explain that scientific research found almost every bowling action involves some straightening of the elbow, and that studies by human movement specialists found it becomes visible to the naked eye, and starts to look like a throw, above 15 degrees. Article 2.1 therefore defines an illegal action as one where the elbow extends by more than 15 degrees between the moment the bowling arm reaches the horizontal and the release of the ball, leaving hyperextension out of the measurement. The 2018 regulations list accredited testing centres in Lahore, Loughborough, Chennai, Brisbane and Pretoria.

How the limit arrived is less well documented in our research. Wisden, which we saw only as a search summary because its page now returns an error, says the ICC approved a single 15-degree limit for bowlers of all speeds in November 2004, after the controversy over Muttiah Muralitharan's action. A press summary says the changes, proposed by an expert panel chaired by Sunil Gavaskar, took effect from 1 March 2005. Both points are unconfirmed.

The MCC's Laws history is on the early Laws, and the dates on this page are in the timeline.