The rise of the left-arm quicks

South Africa capped 37 Test players in the 10-and-a-half years that separated the debuts of Brett Schultz and Charl Willoughby.

Unlike Schultz and Willoughby (both cackhanded quicks) not one of the 37 was a left-arm fast bowler.

Of the 38 Test caps SA have handed to seam bowlers of any stripe - including allrounders - since the end of isolation, only four have gone to southpaw slingers.

That, at least, dovetails with the fact that around 10% of the world's population is left-handed. But the four have played in just 20 of the 212 Tests the Proteas have contested in the modern era, and none of them has 10 caps to their name.

Could those numbers be set for a shake-up, what with Lonwabo Tsotsobe, Wayne Parnell and Beuran Hendricks all flying the flag in the current crop of national players?

Tsotsobe is consistent, Parnell is explosive and Hendricks is the epitome of calm confidence. Between them, they have played 159 matches and taken 207 wickets for SA across all formats.

None of them is Mitchell Johnson, the left-arm terror whose 23 wickets did more than David Warner's three centuries to win the Test series for Australia in South Africa last summer.

But Tsotsobe, Parnell and Hendricks are all quality bowlers who can only add to the Proteas' depth, variety and options.

"Hendricks is young and brave; he's fearless," Stephen Jefferies, former SA cricketer, said yesterday. "Parnell is a handful, but he seems to have lost his swing and that's a pity."

Jeffries' gunslinging left-arm action earned him 478 first-class wickets at 27.62 for Boland, WP, Derbyshire, Hampshire and Lancashire from 1978-1979 to 1993-1994.

It was the era before the explosion of one-day and T20 cricket that dominates today's game.

"The majority of left-handed bowlers swing the ball back into the right-hander, which means there's always a chance of LBW."

"But with all the one-day cricket played these days, there is a tendency to bowl straight and across the batsman, and not to try and swing it as often. The stock ball should be the inswinger."

Jefferies' WP team-mate, former Test batsman Peter Kirsten, said left-armness don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

"They make a definite difference to the angle of the delivery, and that's always going to get right- handed batsmen thinking," he said. "A lot depends on how much they swing the ball, otherwise they are going to go across the batsman."

Of SA's latest left-armers, Kirsten said: "If they could get the swing going consistently, that would be fantastic."

For former SA opening batsman Jimmy Cook, a lack of familiarity bred the need for a change in training tactics.

"Left-armers are more rare than right-armers," Cook said. "Batsmen tend to face right-arm over- the-wicket bowlers more often than left-arm over-the-wicket bowlers.

"That's the way you train and that's how your muscle memory works. But now, at practice, we move the bowling machine to simulate a left-arm bowler."