The scrambled seam is the most underrated ball in the sport

Releasing the ball without a stable upright seam removes the batter's best early information and costs the bowler very little.

A batter picking up a fast bowler is reading two things in the first fifteen metres. The arm, and the seam. Take the second one away and you have done something quietly enormous.

An upright, spinning seam is a signpost. Its angle tells a good player which way the ball is likely to move off the pitch and, in the air, which way it is going to swing. That is why the classic outswing action produces such clean, readable movement, and why a batter of quality can leave forty balls in a row on off stump without looking troubled. He is not guessing. He is reading a rotating white marker travelling at a hundred and forty kilometres an hour, and he is very good at it.

The scrambled seam removes the marker. Released with the seam tumbling rather than spinning on a stable axis, the ball presents an inconsistent face to the air and to the pitch, so it does not swing conventionally and it can deviate either way on landing, in an amount neither bowler nor batter can predict. The bowler has given up control. He has taken away far more control from the other man.

I think it is undervalued because it fails the aesthetic test. Coaches love a seam standing up like a stitched blade, cameras love it, and a bowler who scrambles one looks, in slow motion, like he has mis-released it. There is no highlight reel for the ball that beat the outside edge because nobody knew what it would do. Some of it also gets folded into the fashionable term, wobble seam, which is the same family but usually sold as a modern innovation rather than the very old habit of not caring where the seam points.

The practical case is stronger in the middle overs than with the new ball. Once conventional swing has gone and reverse has not arrived, a seam bowler on a good surface has almost nothing. Cross-seam and scrambled deliveries in that window at least keep the outcome uncertain, and uncertainty is the whole product.

The best bowlers of the last decade mix it in without announcing it, which is why you have watched hundreds of these and never noticed. That is the point. You are not supposed to notice, and neither is the batter.