It was a tough day for Moeen Ali, fined 25% of his match fee for using a drying agent on his hands and rubbing a hole in the skin on his forefinger caused by excessive contact with the Dukes ball’s pronounced seam. Spin bowling has always been a painful business – back in 1913 Surrey’s Razor Smith, nicknamed because of his unusually slight frame, noted that he always knew immediately on releasing the ball whether it would turn or go straight, because if it was a turner he would “get a sharp pain in my shoulder … many’s a time I have gone home feeling as if my right arm was coming off at the shoulder and almost wishing it would do so”.
But the finger has taken the brunt. Yorkshire’s Ted Wainwright, who played five Tests in the 1890s, suffered terribly from spinning-related cuts and lesions. “I used to hold the ball between the thumb and first finger, with the finger pressing along the seam,” he said. “The pressure upon the finger often made the skin break, and I was repeatedly troubled with soreness as a consequence; in fact, it was no uncommon thing for my finger to bleed.” Eventually he took to wearing a bandage on the first finger of his right hand which, he insisted, “far from assisting my bowling, handicapped it very considerably”. From the pavilion, though, the sight of his white finger set conspiracy theorists spinning, leading to him being dogged by rumours that he had commissioned a rubber finger stall to cover his finger, avoid injury and add bonus spin.
