Survival of the fastest

In the August issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly, Dennis Lillee talks to Peter English about the secrets of speed, how to spot a Brett Lee and the way to keep bowlers injury-free

Dennis Lillee: he claims to know in three balls whether a bowler is from the right mould

Dennis Lillee reckons Brett Lee is a perfect specimen for fast bowling. Lee is obviously athletic and charismatic but these are not the attributes that impressed Lillee when he spotted him as a teenager in Sydney. Bowling speed comes from the trunk muscles and Lee had the stomach for it.

"You are born to bowl fast," says Lillee, 53. As a great fast bowler and celebrated coach he is a well-qualified judge. He claims to know in three balls whether a bowler is from the right mould. Lee was one of his "gems". "You see the bowler, you get a gut feel and you're not wrong very often," he says. "It's my forte, just like I could assess a batsman very quickly when I was bowling at them."

The key ingredient is twitch fibres in the abdominal and oblique muscles. Nature makes these fibres fast or slow, and they determine how fast the muscles move, but they can be quickened with speed work. "What we have found through all our research is that contraction through the torso is what gives you speed," he says. "You could be built like Arnie Schwarzenegger but it doesn't mean you will bowl fast. What you need is strong flexible trunk muscles. If you've got slow twitch muscles and a strong trunk you are never going to bowl fast."

Stress fractures forced Lillee to become an expert in bowling science and, when he finished playing, the Australian Cricket Board asked him to help prevent injuries in young bowlers. "I had three stress fractures myself and I did two things. I opened up my action to ease pressure on my spine caused by the twisting, counter-rotation and hyper-extension when I bowled. But my doctor also told me to build up my torso so that the muscles around my spine, stomach and back were going to be so strong that they would take a lot of the strain."

The methods he used during his rehabilitation are now the norm for back-injury prevention. "We now do it before the injury occurs; besides, it makes you bowl faster." It helped Lillee make the transition from fearsome speedster of the 1970s to the masterful control freak of the early 1980s.

It is possible for bowlers with slower twitch fibres to succeed but Lillee says there is a greater fear of them breaking down regularly. He names Shoaib Akhtar, Jason Gillespie and Gary Gilmour, his former Australian team-mate of the 1970s who played 15 Tests, as examples.

While Lillee was in London for the release of his autobiography Menace, he flicked through some photographs of his bowling action. Lillee is tall with long arms and it is easy to see why he frightened batsmen. There is a powerful front arm, huge leap and flowing dark hair. The technique is often referred to as classical. "My action wasn't perfect, I never said it was, but at the end of my career it was far better than at the start." He shadow bowls examples of the three preferred actions, side-on, front-on and mixed - emphasising that the less hip and shoulder separation there is during delivery, the better for preventing injury. Fortunately there is no room for him to use the stare and follow-through that helped him to 355 wickets in 70 Tests.

He is sceptical about the value of photographs, however, because of the angle of the shot - particularly when analysing a chucker. "When assessing bowlers on video we always look from middle stump to middle stump and at 90 degrees. Bad angles can make the action look worse. It's important that we don't jump at shadows."

He despises chucking. The word escapes through the side of his mouth as if it is worse than swearing, because of the huge advantage it gives bowlers. "There are guys who should be monitored much more closely than they are but it appears that once guys have been cleared by someone it's a green light. That's bulldust. Their [potentially suspect] actions should be monitored every time they bowl so we make sure none of this creeps in." Lillee's coaching résumé is almost as long as his run-up. His brief with the ACB was to rectify the shortage of quality bowlers - the Australian attack was ageing under Craig McDermott and Merv Hughes - and he has been working with their Academy for almost 15 years. In Chennai he is the star coach at the MRF Pace Foundation, which he visits about four times a year. It has produced Javagal Srinath, Zaheer Khan and "almost everyone who has played for India in the last 10 years".

He is often asked about the secret of fast bowling. "I say listen carefully because I'm only going to tell you this once. The secret is work, work and more hard work." And fast twitch fibres.

DK on England's future
James Anderson
"I rate him. He has very good endeavour, hasn't been over-coached, has a quite natural action, looks fit and strong and enjoys what he does. And he's got pace. They're pretty good attributes."

Steve Harmison
"He's the future here. He's got a slight glitch in his action where he bowls down leg-side but it can be fixed in no time. Troy Cooley, who's been my apprentice and knows more than me now, is at the England Academy and he's fantastic so they probably don't need me to sort it out."

Matthew Hoggard
"I was impressed with the way he went about his work in the first Test against Zimbabwe and a couple of times in Australia. He impressed me every time. On the Saturday at Lord's I liked the way he charged in every ball and swung it."