In the game of
cricket, the Chinaman is the left-handed leg spinners version of the infamous
googly. Whereas the googly is bowled by a right-handed
leg spinner, and moves from a right-handed batmans
off stump towards his
leg stump, the chinaman is bowled by left-handers and is a pitch that looks as if it could turn into a right-handed batsman on the bounce, but breaks away towards
off instead, essentially behaving like an
off-break, but disguised as a
leg-break, and bowled from the back of the
bowlers hand
Cricketing folklore claims that the chinaman is so called because the first person to have delivered such a ball during a match was Ellis Achong, a bowler of Chinese extraction, and it was delivered during a match played in the West Indies sometime between 1929 and 1934. It is so called as when the batsman who first fell foul of this particular delivery, apparently an Englishman by the name of Walter Robins, returned to the pavilion, he was heard to exclaim "Fancy getting out to a bloody Chinaman"