West Australian bowler Lance Morris terrorises country’s best cricketers with freakish speed

Former Scarborough captain Wes Robinson found that out earlier than most.

“The eyes must have popped out of my head the first ball that he bowled because it was the speed of light,” Robinson recalls of a teenage Morris’ first net session with the club in 2015.

The sound of one bouncer cannoning into corrugated iron at the indoor centre still rings fresh in his ears today. Thankfully for Robinson he was only an onlooker and not a participant, making the quick decision to call-up the 17-year-old for his first-grade debut.

A country kid who loved nothing more than making batters hop, that day in the confines of the Wanneroo Indoor Cricket Centre proved to Morris what everyone back home already knew – that he was genuinely quick.

“You think, ‘I’m just a country kid who’s sort of a fair way behind everyone else here (in Perth)’,” Morris says. “It took a little while to get some self-belief and realise that you’re actually good enough to play at that level.

“I remember running in off about five steps and just trying to let them go as quick as I could. That was probably when I realised I was troubling a few people.”

Having never played a game of Premier Cricket, he debuted in first grade for Scarborough and his doubts disappeared.

“I’ve actually got some talent here, I can make something out of it.”

Seven years on and Morris is well on his way to ‘making something out of it’. A key part of Western Australia’s Sheffield Shield-winning side last summer – he was one of four players to feature in all eight games – this summer Morris has led the charge in the Warriors’ title defence. He’s picked up 22 wickets so far this season. Only Michael Neser and Mark Steketee, with 24 and 23 respectively, have fared better.

Still with room to grow, the 24-year-old is contested only by Tasmania’s Riley Meredith as the fastest bowler in the country, regularly clocking in the low 150s and averaging around the 145-147 mark.

It’s the kind of pace that has made his purpose in the WA attack an obvious one.

“I absolutely love my role in the team, it’s been clear from day dot. It’s a licence to bowl fast and try and intimidate.”

That’s the kind of pace that muddles the footwork and thinking of even the best batters. Just ask Marnus Labuschagne and Usman Khawaja, who took on Morris for Queensland in the Sheffield Shield earlier this month. Labuschagne, sitting second on the ICC Test batting rankings, was trapped plumb in front for 2, his feet neither moving backward or forward. Khawaja, sitting sixth on the rankings, fell for a three-ball duck, wafting at a ball outside off.

The fast bowler is averaging 18.22 in the Shield this summer. Each campaign has seen him take a marked step forward in terms of numbers, going from 12 wickets at 36.83 in his first season, to 22 at 27.05 last summer.

It’s improvement he pins on experience.

“The step up in every level is consistency. That’s the element I’ve improved on the most I’d say. That just comes naturally with game experience and getting overs under the belt bowling to some pretty good players.”

Of course, that consistency was not always there.

There’s one more thing Robinson, who is now working in WA’s development system, remembers from that net session at Wanneroo and Morris’ early years at Scarborough: the birth of his nickname, adopted from the great Shaun Tait.

“In true ‘Wild Thing’ fashion some went left and some went right,” Robinson says. “His control in terms of what he needed to get to wasn’t quite there but he bowled genuinely quick. Scary quick some days.”

Nobody at Scarborough liked to face Morris, and nobody at Western Australia does either.

“He absolutely let these rockets go and with the greatest respect to him he probably didn’t have the control that he is showing us that he’s got now,” former WA bowling coach Matt Mason recalls of the first time he saw Morris in action.

“Nobody wanted to get in there and face him just because of the pace, the bounce, the misdirection from time-to-time making him a handful. He absolutely loved the fact he was getting people hopping around.”

Mason enjoyed three seasons as WA and the Perth Scorchers’ bowling coach, having spent nearly two decades serving similar roles in county cricket in England. He’s seen plenty of fast bowlers in his time, and Morris still stands out to him.

“He’s right up there with the quickest I’ve ever seen. My mind goes back to a game last year in Tasmania. He hit 152km/h in his first over of the day, that’s extreme pace.

“He generally averages around the 145-147kmh which is as quick as any of the guys playing internationally anywhere in the world so he is right up there and he does it easy. It looks like it’s easy pace for him.

“It was great sometimes watching him and Jhye Richardson go toe-to-toe at net practice when we had the speed gun out. You could see Richo stick one down there at 145 and then Lance just crank one up at 147 just to let him know he’s around.”

The Wild Thing nickname was cemented by the widest of bouncers to England captain Joe Root in a tour game for a WA XI in 2017 and popularised when he snapped Shaun Marsh’s bat in half in a BBL game for the Melbourne Stars. But it did not always sit well with Morris.

“I made the mistake early doors of fighting it a bit and that just made it stick even more. I think I’ll always say there was only one Wild Thing and that’s Shaun Tait,” he laughs.

“I probably never really cared about consistency or hitting a spot or trying to swing a ball massively or anything like that. I just enjoyed running in and letting it go and trying to make batters jump around.

He’s at peace with the moniker now, but in truth it has faded over the past two summers. It no longer quite fits.

“Honestly by the time I finished (in WA), you didn’t hear it much,” Mason says. “He earned the respect of everybody with the way he progressed and his control improved.”

Counterintuitively, Morris’ improved control has not come from a concerted effort to rein it in.

“It was absolutely just getting him excited about bowling fast,” Mason says of the approach WA took with Morris. “It’s such a rare thing. The last thing I wanted to do was try and tame him too much.

“Freeing him up like that, taking the pressure off him – because I think he felt he had to be a certain way – by having his coach say, ‘No it’s okay, you need to let rip’, and then with the leadership from Shaun Marsh who used him brilliantly, head coach Adam Voges backing us all the way in, he just sort of grew from there.

“When it doesn’t go quite right, it’s just reassuring him that it is OK, it really doesn’t matter, he’s still impacting the game because nobody wants to be facing him.

“At no point do we really pull him to pieces or discourage him. We know we’re going to get a bad day here or there because he is young. Even the greatest of them do. In Australian cricket currently Mitch Starc has bad days but at no point do you ever try and rein him in because he’s such a weapon and I think we treat Lance the same way.”

Mason is not the first coach to have told Morris to just let it rip.

That honour goes to father Garry, who was at first slip when his son made his Dunsborough A-grade debut as a 12-year-old.

“Just to have fun and just to do what was natural. That was just to bowl quick, and do whatever felt good,” Morris Sr recalls as the advice he passed on. “It was all about encouraging him to keep bowling quick instead of trying to harbour it.”

It’s advice that served him well back then – he accounted for Busselton Margaret River Cricket Association perennial player of the year Martin Head when he was 12 – and has served him well now.

Lance already has a Sheffield Shield winners medal and hopefully one day he’ll pick up a baggy green. Garry’s picked up a few souvenirs along the way too.

“I’ve got a few dents in my garage door from Lance bowling probably a bit too quick in the backyard. Divots everywhere.”