Wobble seam is a bet against your own accuracy

Letting the seam flutter surrenders control of direction for uncertainty the batter shares, which suits some bowlers and ruins others.

The wobble ball spread through international cricket the way most bowling fashions do, which is by one very good bowler doing it and everyone else copying the grip without copying the reasoning. Split the fingers wider, hold the seam upright but let it tilt, release without the rigid wrist lock. The ball arrives with the seam scrambling and lands on whichever side happens to be down.

That is the point and also the problem. Neither party knows which way it will go. Against a batter who plays late and off the pitch, ambiguity is worth a lot, because he cannot commit to a line and his defensive shot has to cover more width than his bat does. Against a batter who plays the length rather than the line, and there are plenty of those in the long form, the wobble ball is a slightly worse conventional delivery.

What nobody says out loud is that it is expensive for a bowler who is not naturally accurate. If your stock ball already wanders by twenty centimetres, adding scrambled deviation gives you a delivery that can end up anywhere and a batter who only has to wait. The bowlers it has worked best for are the ones who could put six balls in a saucer if they chose to, and who therefore had accuracy to spend.

There is a durability argument too. Conventional swing needs a shiny side, which needs a team willing to work on the ball, which needs a long stretch of consistent effort. Wobble seam needs almost nothing from the ball's condition. In a format where the ball goes soft fast and the fielding side has no real chance to build a shine, it is the only sideways movement available. That is why you see it most in the middle overs of white ball cricket and on flat surfaces where swing died in the eighth over.

My reservation is about coaching. It is being taught to teenagers as a stock delivery before they have a stock delivery. A seventeen year old who can scramble the seam but cannot land the ball twice in the same place has learned the trick and skipped the craft.

Learn to bowl straight first. Then earn the right to be unpredictable.