The origin of the word Chinaman in cricket

04/07/2020

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There have been objections to the use of the word -Chinaman- which has been the focal point of a wider culture war but the usage of it now transcended time. Basically, a chinaman bowler bowls left-arm wrist spin which turns into the right-handed batsmen and away from the left-handers.

The world has seen many practitioners of the craft in the form of Kuldeep Yadav, Tabraiz Shamsi, Chuck Fleetwood-Smith, Garry Sobers, Denis Compton, Paul Adams, Michael Bevan, Brad Hogg and Dave Mohammed. Their ability to keep the batsmen under the guise to vary their length and the type of bowling made them a special kind in their own right. But has it ever come to your mind why certain kinds of bowlers are often referred to as “Chinaman and not left-arm unorthodox spinners?

The Theory

Although the 19th-century South African allrounder Charlie Llewellyn had claimed that he invented the delivery, after wider research, it is believed that former West Indian spinner Ellis Achong, the Trinidad bowler of the Chinese heritage, bowled a wrist-spin delivery that turned from off to leg of English batsman Walter Robins in the Old Trafford Test of 1933. The Middlesex all-rounder was so frustrated that when he walked off, he suddenly looked at the umpire Joe Hardstaff, saying, “Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman.” West Indies pace bowler Learie Constantine, who was fielding nearby, instantly replied, “Is that the man, or the ball?”

However, this is far from exclusively right. The Senior senior sportswriter for The Guardian Andy Bull claims that the term “Chinaman” was being used in English cricket long before Achong came on tour that Bull wrote that it was actually a Yorkshire phrase, meaning if someone put “Irish” on the spinning delivery. Bull cited a book review from September 1926 on the same publication, that the term was first used in the paragraph, “Who has ever seen Macaulay bowl the ‘googly’ in serious cricket? And if he did, what would a certain other member of the Yorkshire XI have to say about this sudden use of ‘t’Chinaman’?”

Objections to the word

In 2017, after Kuldeep Yadav made his Test debut for India against Australia in Dharamsala, Chinese-origin Australian journalist Andrew Wu found it disrespectful and in his blog for the Sydney Morning Herald, Wu wrote, “Uncomfortable at how often and insensitively the term was being used after Kuldeep's efforts, this correspondent challenged cricket to get rid of the racially offensive term. There were also calls for Chinaman to be seen as a term of endearment due to the difficulty of the delivery, except its origin in cricket came not out of respect but disbelief that an Englishman could lose his wicket to a Chinese.”

“The term is not used in a disparaging manner in the context of cricket, but that alone is not justification for its continued use. It's just as well Robins did not bemoan being dismissed by a "chink". A simple solution would be for the craft to be known as left-arm wrist-spin, in recognition of it being bowled with the left arm and the wrists being used to generate the spin,” Wu further said.

Wisden found this a valid objection, and since removed the word from their cricketing vocabulary, replacing it with “left-arm wrist spin.”