He may have taken the least number of wickets among the West Indian quartet, but many consider Andy Roberts the meanest of the lot. Roberts is now a respected bowling coach, and runs a small supermarket in St. John's with his girlfriend. The penguin-like walk has remained the same, and Roberts still shows some fire when it comes to talking about the decline of fast, short bowling in today's game.

Mr. Roberts, is short-pitched bowling a dying art?
Well, I think fast bowling itself, genuine fast bowling, seems to be going out of cricket. What captains and coaches are looking for are bowlers who can bowl a line which will restrict the opposition. So, in that sense I think genuine fast bowling is becoming a dying art.

Surely, no captain who has a genuinely fast bowler in his ranks would prefer him to bowl within himself…
Well, a lot of captains do, and I must say that in the Caribbean at present, we seem to be doing that. We're more concerned with keeping pressure on the batsmen, keeping it tight, instead of being aggressive. I like to see young fast bowlers aggressive.

Is that is a result of the coaching they receive at an early age?
It could be. I'm speaking primarily for the Caribbean. Fast bowling is not encouraged any more in the Caribbean. What is more encouraged is line-and-length bowling.

In the last, say, five years or so, have you seen anyone with the ability to terrorise batsmen with a sustained spell of short-pitched bowling?
You have to remember there is a limit to the number of short-pitched deliveries you can bowl nowadays. But I don't see anyone, you know, inclined to bowling fast, short-pitched deliveries. Most of what you see is tight bowling. You can count all the genuine fast bowlers on one hand. There are only two bowlers today who can bowl consistently over 90 miles an hour.

One of them doesn't have a clean action, do you think?
Not one, there are queries over both their actions. See, the law clearly states that your arm must be straight at the point of delivery. So if your arm isn't straight at the point of delivery, it means then, that something is wrong. The law also states that you can bowl with a bent elbow, but then you cannot straighten it.

So are you calling them chuckers?
Well, I wouldn't like to go into that. All I can say is that the law clearly states that you cannot straighten the elbow while delivering the ball.

You were said to have two bouncers: a quick one, and a really quick one. Have you seen bowlers after you do something like that?
No. I don't think bowlers today really put that amount of effort into their short-pitched deliveries. I think that's the difference.

The decline in bowling short has obviously affected the batsman's ability to tackle the short-pitched ball…
Yes, batting against short, fast bowling is also a dying art. Few people these days hook. What you find a lot of people do is to pull. Because there is no real genuine fast bowling taking the ball up to your head on a regular basis, what the batsman now do is to pull it. A pull is a shot played to a ball between waist height and chest height and hit more through the midwicket area or thereabouts. A lot of balls nowadays go to the square leg area. Not many to fine leg.

But the greatest players of short-pitched bowling may not be the hookers. They could also be the evaders, couldn't they?
Yes, it doesn't mean that if you can't hook then you can't play short-pitched bowling. See, bowling short is not to hit you. Bowling short is to get you out. So you find that the players who can evade are the most difficult ones to dislodge. When I was bowling bouncers, and I saw a batsman sway forwards or backwards, then it didn't give me any encouragement. Because you know that the player is really picking the ball up.

So the evaders demoralized you more than the hookers?
The hookers encouraged me. Those who hooked up encouraged me even more.

You think the introduction of the helmet has had an impact on batting technique against short bowling?
The introduction of all this protective gear has certainly helped the decline of a solid technique against genuine fast bowling. You no longer have to watch the ball all the way because of the protection, but in the early days when there wasn't all this amount of protection, you had to watch the ball from the bowler's hand right into the wicketkeeper's gloves.

Let's talk about some of the greatest players of short bowling you've seen...
Well, they weren't too many of them. Viv Richards was a great player of short-pitched bowling, Garry Sobers was a great player of short-pitched bowling. Richie Richardson was a great player. Ian Chappell. Gundappa Viswanath was very good on a bouncy pitch, because he used so much wrist.

Viv Richards. Some say bowlers, fast bowlers too, were scared of bowling at him. Would you agree?
I think so. Yes, I do think so. He played fast bowling so well. If you bounce him, he will take you on. Ninety nine percent of the time, he comes out on top. He was also a very good driver on both sides of the pitch, and he cut so well.

Ian Chappell…
He was very good. I think he was more stubborn of the two Chappell brothers. In my estimation, he was also a more difficult customer to bowl to. He withstood the pressure much better.

Viswanath…
He was a good player. Very, very good player. The two innings he played in the 1974-75 series were very, very good. He would get on top of the ball and just with a flick of the wrist he would hit it through point. He had a very special gift.

Which of those two innings in 74-75 would you rate better? The century at Calcutta, or the 97 at Madras?
The one at Madras, because it was on a more bouncy pitch. In the Kolkata innings, he could have been out early. He was dropped at slip. The Madras innings was chanceless.

What about Gavaskar?
Sunil was a different type of player. On a bouncy pitch, Sunil wasn't as good a player as Gundappa. But when Sunil catches you on this type of pitch [we are at the pleasant Antigua Recreation Ground] then he was one of the most difficult batsmen in the world to dislodge. Not that Sunil didn't hook – Sunil hooked, but he had more problems against the real quicks bowling short on a bouncy pitch.

What about Roy Fredericks?
One of the best. One of the very best. Hooks, cuts, everything. And he wasn't scared of anything.

If you could watch a contest of your choice – a genuinely fast bowler digging it in to a batsman ready to take him on – what would that be?
Very difficult. I've never played much against Viv, I've played a few times against Roy Fredericks but on those occasions he refrained from hooking. But I've seen Roy Fredericks take apart Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee in Australia, at Perth. That was a real thrashing. That would be it.

Rahul Bhattacharya is a staff writer with Wisden.com in India. His reports will appear here throughout the Test series.

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