Only two types of delivery in cricket have been so distinctive that they have been named after their creator. In the case of the `bosie' the term seems to have fallen into disuse even in Australia, except in Richie Benaud's erudite vocabulary. Bumpers and bouncers, in- and outswingers, off- and legbreaks, cutters, flippers and zooters, all derive their name from their nature or function. (Even John Woodcock named one of his dogs after the yorker, not the other way round.)

The other delivery to be called after its progenitor is the Chinaman, the left-armer's mirror image of the right-arm legbreak (although in Australia the term has tended to apply to the left-arm wrist-spinner's googly, not the stock ball which darts into the right-hander). Bowlers of it have always been the rarest species in cricket, and they neared extinction in the pace-dominated late 1970s and'80s. But like the legbreak, albeit on a more modest scale, the Chinaman is coming back, and when Michael Bevan routed West Indies just over a year ago in Adelaide, it was the first time that a Chinaman bowler had ever taken ten wickets in a Test match.

At Sydney this winter, when Australia met South Africa, two Chinaman bowlers can be said to have played, though it would be more accurate to categorise Paul Adams as a left-arm googly bowler who only seldom turns a ball into the right-hand batsman, and then not much. If there is a revival, it has of course passed English cricket by: as far as my research goes, we have never produced a specialist Chinaman bowler per se, only occasional exponents.

A typical case is that of the England coach on the West Indian tour, David Lloyd, who began as a Chinaman bowler for Accrington and joined the Lancashire staff primarily in that capacity. But, as `Bumble' recounts in his inimitable style, he was quickly persuaded to put the funny stuff away and to concentrate on orthodox left-arm spin, then batting. Seamers ruled on the Old Trafford pitches of the 1960s and early'70s: what was the point of buying wickets when seamers and finger-spinners could take them at a discount?

Rare as the English experience of left-arm wrist-spin is, however, the type has always clung on in two different parts of the world. One of them is south-eastern Australia. The second is Trinidad, the original home of the Chinaman himself; and, sure enough, when England played their two-day game against the island at Guaracara Park, Trinidad & Tobago fielded a 19-year-old Chinaman bowler, Avidesh Samaroo, who took four wickets in England's only innings.

The original Chinaman, Ellis Achong, was born in Trinidad in 1904, and remains the only man of his race to have played Test cricket. His nickname, `Puss', had nothing to do with cricket. His first sport was football, and he earned the name for his silky feline skills as a left winger, possessed of a kick strong enough to score goals when he took corners. The youngest international footballer whose age has been verified was Tormod Kjeldsen, a 15-year-old Norwegian, in 1910. Achong, too, was 15 and still at school when he represented Trinidad in the inter-colonial tournament.

His school was St Mary's College, which is still the leading Catholic school in Port-of-Spain, while the chief school of the Anglican establishment is Queen's Royal College, which looks out on the Savannah (the central park) from its cool cream colonnades. Not nearly so establishment, St Mary's was the school of Captain Cipriani, who led the trade-union disturbances of the 1930s that became the first stirrings of the independence movement. Another Cipriani played in the same distinguished forward line as `Puss' for the Maple club, and so too did Clifford Roach, the first West Indian to score a Test double-century and a man who worked so hard at law that he became one of the first black barristers.

The Achong brothers – Puss was the third of five boys – were well-to-do because their father was a cocoa planter, and Trinidad was renowned for producing some of the world's best cocoa. The father, born on the island, was mainly but not entirely Chinese, and the woman he married – Puss's mother – was part-African, part-Carib. (Trinidad is still an amazing magimix of racial types.) The story goes that when the West Indian touring team of 1933 arrived in England, a Chinese delegation turned up at Waterloo station to greet Achong as honourable representative of the great Chinese people, but abruptly left when they found he was not the full Mandarin. Yet his appearance is more Chinese than anything else.

Achong's original preference for football had faded by the time he reached England, aged 29. He had made his first-class debut in 1929–30 against MCC at Port-of-Spain, and contributed 4 for 43 and 3 for 39 to Trinidad's 102-run victory. As he followed with five more wickets in the return match against Trinidad– two games against each island on those long-gone tours – Puss was selected for the Port-of-Spain Test. In England's first innings his figures were 2 for 64, but in the second he twisted his ankle while fielding. So limited was first-class cricket in the West Indies then, owing to the distances and the time involved in sailing by ship, that Achong's next match was not until 1932, when the inter-colonial tournament was staged in Barbados. For the first time in his life Puss bowled on turf. Trinidad won the cup, and Achong found his name being sung in a calypso on his return as he had taken 7 for 77 in an innings against British Guiana.

In England on the 1933 tour Achong bowled more than anyone, 960 overs, for his 71 first-class wickets. If the Barbados tournament was the first time he had bowled on a surface other than matting, an even greater adjustment was required to play cricket six days a week every week. The London newspapers were quite favourably impressed, one of them referring to Achong having `the easy action of Colin Blythe'. Another reported: `He spun the ball left-handed and varies his flight, break and pace as one of his imperturbable and intelligent race might be expected to do.' (A little Patronisingly Incorrect, but there you go.) This mention of varying his break is highly relevant here. Achong delivered most balls in the same way as orthodox finger-spinners. His variation was the one which turned into the right-hander, in other words the Chinaman.

It was during the Old Trafford Test that the term Chinaman was born, by most accounts. England had been bowled out cheaply by Manny Martindale, the unlauded forerunner of the West Indian fast bowlers of the 1980s. West Indies built a big lead through centuries by Ivan Barrow and George Headley. But England were able to bat through to a draw on an abominably slow pitch, and as they were nearing safety, Achong was bowling and delivered one of his variations, from which Walter Robins was stumped for 55. `Fancy being out to a bloody Chinaman,' fumed Robins. Learie Constantine retorted, so the story runs: `Do you mean the bowler or the ball?' And thereafter the left-armer's ball turning into the right-hander has been known as the Chinaman.

 Achong was not quite the first to bowl this specific type of delivery. During the 1920s, whenever Wilfred Rhodes and Roy Kilner and George Macaulay were not mopping up for Yorkshire, Maurice Leyland began his experiments, which eventually realised over 400 first-class wickets. Leyland's team-mates came to refer to `those Chinese things of yours'. I would be delighted to hear of any pre-Achong exponents that WCM readers know about. Did the South African Charles Llewellyn, who came to Hampshire, bowl the Chinaman before the First World War? And if so, what did he call it?

Subsequent Chinaman bowlers produced by English cricket have not been specialists any more than Leyland was. Denis Compton, Jack Ikin and Donald Carr dabbled in spare moments to some effect, though not in Test cricket. The only one with that honour is Johnny Wardle. As in the case of David Lloyd at Lancashire, and David Steele on joining Northants, Wardle was deterred from bowling wrist-spin for Yorkshire: on uncovered pitches up north he had to be the successor to Peel, Rhodes and Verity. It was only on tour with England that Wardle was given the scope to show his immense versatility, and so bewildering were his Chinamen and googlies on the 1956–57 tour of South Africa that he took 90 first-class wickets. Geoff Boycott recalls that when Wardle tagged along on a Yorkshire tour of Bermuda a decade after his retirement, he could still rip it both ways on a consistent length.

The last of the kind produced by county cricket was Barry Dudleston, again an occasional exponent only. Once he took four Surrey wickets for six runs: `Illy chucked me the ball and told me to bowl for a declaration,' he chuckles. His greatest moment came when he dismissed Garry Sobers, of Notts, second ball. `He smashed my first ball through mid-on, then it was the end of the over, and when I bowled to him again I forgot to take the gully away and had him caught there from one that turned.' The Chinaman is more effective against left-handers for turning away from them. The ideal wrist-spinner would be one who bowls right-arm to right-handers and left-arm to left-handers. Mushtaq Ahmed is not too far away from this ideal.

Chuck Fleetwood-Smith was the first Chinaman bowler to make a substantial mark in Test cricket, during the 1930s. He turned it as much as a later South Australian, David Sincock: he had to, because pitches at the Adelaide Oval have traditionally been as unsympathetic to finger-spinners as any on earth. A similar environment has accounted for Sydney producing Jack Walsh for Leicestershire's benefit, Johnny Martin and now David Freedman; and for Melbourne nurturing George Tribe for Northants, Lindsay Kline and David Hourn. On an old-time cast-iron pitch made from Bulli soil a left-arm spinner had the alternative of ripping it or retiring.

It was in Australia too that Sobers himself bowled his Chinamen to greatest effect. Barry Jarman, now a Test referee, was South Australia's wicketkeeper in the three seasons that Sobers played for them, and as he also kept to Sincock, he rates left-arm wrist-spin as `the most interesting type I've ever kept to. Sobie was so accurate and nobody could read him, not even Neil Harvey.' Especially not Neil Harvey. `Neil would say: BJ, I want you to say ding-a-ling-a-ling when Sobers bowls his googly, but after a couple of times he said to me: BJ, you bastard.' A certain amount of disinformation seems to have been disseminated. `Sobie would always have a slip and a gully, bowl a lot of googlies and get the batsmen caught, if not stumped,' remembered Jarman fondly. `Then when a new ball was due, we'd wind Sobie up by telling him that the batsmen didn't rate his pace bowling and he'd swing'em out.'

On his 1933 tour Achong met Miss Sombra Baum of Leicester, and the same year he married her. As they wanted to stay in England, Puss became the professional for Rochdale in the Lancashire League, and took 121 wickets at seven runs apiece the following year. He kept on as a pro for various league clubs until 1951, by which time he had taken over 1600 wickets. During the war he worked in Liverpool as a welfare and liaison officer for West Indians employed in England, and was known to give help from his own wallet to indigent cases. The young Frank Worrell used to live at the Achongs' house in Lancashire and got married from there. According to Achong's surviving daughter, Yolande, `Frank was like a big brother to me.' Yolande is now living in Trinidad and married to the part-time cricket statistician Mervyn Wong, who is also of Chinese origin. OK, let's get this over with: if you come to Trinidad to find out more about the original Chinaman, yes, you do have to ring the Wong number.

Puss died in 1984 in Trinidad, whither he had returned in 1952 to become a cricket coach, but his legacy lives on. Inshan Ali was his most notable successor: his Trinidad captain, Joey Carew, speaks very highly of the late Inshan, because he had the control to bowl to his field. When England met Trinidad in 1980–81 they faced another Chinaman bowler in Alston Daniel, the first Tobagonian to play first-class cricket. Perhaps best of all, though, was Shervan Pragg, the West Indian Under-19 player who died in a car crash in Port-of-Spain in 1982 before he could play first-class circket. The West Indian reliance on four fast bowlers might have been different if Pragg had lived, or at least he might have played more Tests than Roger Harper. Bernard Julien, the Kent and West Indies left-arm opening bowler of the 1970s, bowled the Chinaman later on in his versatile career; and now there is Samaroo.

The reason why Trinidad has nurtured so relatively many Chinaman bowlers was supplied by Achong himself: `You can get much more bite and turn out of a matting wicket.' Look out upon the Savannah in Port-of-Spain, an enormous expanse of ground for any city to have, let alone one squeezed between mountains and the sea, and where there are not football pitches or temporary stands for Carnival, there are cricket pitches on which matting is spread. Trinidad's first turf pitch was not laid until 1948, at Guaracara Park; the Test ground at Queen's Park did not follow until the 1950s, and only in the '90s did all the pitches in Port-of-Spain's first division have to be grass. Everywhere else they are still as they used to be, matting laid on sand, as most grounds are on public land, not easily protected from footballers or goats, and the grass-eating mole cricket breeds in the soil.

Even if the breed dies out in Australia and elsewhere, the Chinaman bowler should continue in Trinidad. It is as if Puss has not yet had all of his nine lives.

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