IT IS described by those who witnessed it as the greatest over ever bowled: Michael Holding, taking the new ball for the West Indies in the 1981 Test against England at the Kensington Oval in Barbados. They called him “whispering death”. His run-up, which started close to the sight-screen, was so graceful, the feet so light upon the turf, that it was said that the umpires couldn't hear him approach. The action was beautifully languid, so that he appeared to put no effort into the delivery. And yet the ball would whistle past the batsman's nose at unplayable speed. At a time when the West Indies had a quartet of fast bowlers considered to be the most fearsome the world had ever seen, Mr Holding was perhaps the slipperiest.

That day he was at his terrifying peak. Geoffrey Boycott, the unfortunate batsman at the other end, said it was the fastest over he had ever faced. And he was no yellow youth. He was one of England's greatest-ever batsman, with a wonderful eye and an unflappable temperament. Yet for those six balls he played as if he were a blind man swatting at swifts. They say of a sniper's bullet that if you hear it, then you are safe, because it will already have passed safely by. It is the ones that you don't hear that do for you. In that over, five balls screeched past Mr Boycott's flailing bat. The sixth made a horrible mess of his stumps.

For the mortals in the stands, it is perhaps the greatest mystery in the game: how can top batsmen play fast bowling? That day Mr Holding was clearly too good for Mr Boycott. But in the next Test, at the Antigua Recreation Ground, he scored a century against the same bowling attack.

The generally-accepted definition of a fast bowler is one who bowls consistently at over 90 miles (145 km) per hour. A cricket pitch is just 22 yards (20 metres) long. That gives batsmen around half a second to pick up the trajectory of the ball, decide which shot to play, and then to execute it. As if that were not hard enough, the best bowlers not only get the ball to swing laterally through the air, but also to deviate off the pitch. In that time the batsman must make up his mind whether to defend the ball, attack it, leave it to pass the stumps or, if it is aimed at his chin, take evasive action.

When playing a cross-batted shot, such as a pull or a cut, the timing needed to connect with the ball seems impossible. According to a study in Nature Neuroscience, “the batsman must judge the vertical position of the ball to within 3cm (limited by the bat's width) and its time of arrival to within 3 milliseconds (limited by the time the ball takes to pass the effective percussion zone of the bat).”

So what sets such batsmen apart? It is tempting to assume that they simply have better visual reaction times than the rest of us and can pick the ball up quicker. But according to “Wait”, a new book by Frank Partnoy, that is not the case. The book is about general decision-making in life, but contains a chapter on “super-fast sports”. It concludes that the best batsmen are no faster at “seeing” than their less successful colleagues, or even many amateurs. Whether you are Virender Sehwag or a village-green clubber, it will take you around 200 milliseconds to react to the ball. The best batsmen are set apart by what happens in the next 200 milliseconds, which the book calls the preparation stage. This means deciding on the shot, moving into the correct position and swinging the bat. (The third stage, hitting the ball, accounts for the last 100 milliseconds.) And here the margin between us and them is miniscule: “A cricket batsman who is just fifty milliseconds slower than an average professional—in other words, someone who is slower by just a fraction of the time it takes to blink—simply has no chance of competing with the pros.” Quoting Peter McLeod, an Oxford professor, the book goes on: “Their skill, it seems, lies in how they use the information to control motor actions once they have picked it up, not in the more elementary process of picking it up.”

This cannot be done consciously, because conscious contemplation takes at least half a second, by which time your stumps may have been uprooted. Few sports can match cricket's need for super-fast, unconscious reaction. Baseball is one; tennis—particularly returning serve—is another. The fastest reaction times of all, claims Mr Partnoy, are needed in fencing. To score an épée, he claims, you must beat your opponent to the hit by just 40 milliseconds. By comparison, players in football, American football and basketball have an eternity to weigh their options.

Now a commentator, Mr Boycott is often asked his advice on how to play fast bowling. He has a simple mantra: watch the ball and play it as late as possible. Of course, he never thought about the mechanics of what it means to judge a stroke to within the time it takes to blink an eye. To him, as with all great players, it was mere instinct (honed, naturally, by dedicated training). For the rest of us mortals, perhaps the only consolation is that we have always been just 50 milliseconds away from greatness.