Doosra

A cricket term which dates from around 2004. A doosra is a ball bowled by a right-arm spinner that moves from leg to off instead of the normal off-break. It is not bowled out of the back of the hand with wrist spin. It is bowled with the same action as the normal off-break but with the fingers going the other way to impart leg spin to the ball. Its invention is attributed to Saqlain Mushtaq the Pakistan spin bowler but the word itself was coined by Moin Khan the Pakistan wicketkeeper who used to urge Saqlain to bowl the delivery by shouting, “Doosra!”, which in both Urdu and Hindi means second or other. In other words, he was urging Saqlain to bowl ‘the other one’. Many other bowlers have developed this delivery, not without controversy over their bowling actions, such as Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan, India’s Harbhajan Singh and South Africa’s Johan Botha. As recently as April 2011, Michael Holding the respected cricket commentator and former West Indian fast bowler maintained that because the elbow is invariably bent in order to deliver the doosra, it should not be considered a legal delivery.