It's December 2002, and Australia A wicketkeeper Ryan Campbell is about to do something completely audacious. The West Australian is facing Sri Lankan left arm quick Nuwan Zoysa in a one-day match at the Gabba. As Zoysa releases the ball, Campbell steps his right leg across to the offside so that he's facing front-on to the bowler. He crouches low and extends his bat directly out in front of him. The ball bounces just in front of Campbell, who keeps moving across to the offside while simultaneously flipping the ball over his left shoulder and the disbelieving Sri Lankan wicketkeeper down to the boundary for four. Two balls later he does it again, flipping a full toss directly over the keeper's head. As Campbell's momentum takes him further across to the off-side he completes a commando roll, while the ball bounces just once before going over to the boundary rope and into the sightscreen. Ryan Campbell had just invented the ramp shot … or had he? Fast forward 22 years and Sam Konstas is intent on throwing Indian fast bowler Jaspit Bumrah off his game during the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne. Konstas plays a series of ramp shots lurching Australian Test match cricket forward into a new era. His ramp shots that shocked and delighted in equal measure had hitherto been deemed too risky for Test cricket — in Australia at least. Not so in England, where the country's all-time leading Test run-scorer Joe Root savaged Australia with reverse ramp shots (switching to a left-handed grip) during the 2023 Ashes series. Konstas and Root are the exceptions. For around two decades, the ramp shot had been solely used in white-ball cricket, where attacking batting and daring shot play has greater currency in the risk versus reward equation of shorter games. The invention of the ramp was revolutionary because it opened up a sizeable quadrant of the ground which had effectively been out of play. A batter could play an array of shots that accessed most areas of the ground from third man to fine leg. Those shots were taken from the so-called 'textbook' — a mythical publication that prescribed the correct technique for playing cuts, drives, hooks, glances and so on. But according to the textbook, the pizza slice of the ground between fine leg and third man was essentially out of bounds for attacking shots. It was the ramp — sometimes called the scoop or lap scoop — that really changed everything, bringing in to play the section of the ground behind the wicketkeeper. Now batting was truly a 360-degree game. But when did it begin and who was the first to invent a shot that has fundamentally changed cricket? Which brings us back to Ryan Campbell at the Gabba in 2002. The idea of a ramp shot, he explained, was a theory that had been playing around in his head for some time: "I, as the wicketkeeper had to sit through so many bowlers' meetings in one-day cricket of how we were going to bowl at the death," Campbell told ABC Sport. Each time the group reached the same consensus: "We're going to be really full at the death and we're going to have fine leg up in the circle and we're going to have mid-on back and we're going to get hit down the ground," Campbell said. "And I just sat there (and) I had a theory. "I literally thought 'well, the one thing in cricket that we don't know as a batsman is where the bowler is going to try and bowl'. "That's the skill of batting — it's we don't know what the bowler is going to do. But I'm thinking to myself, well, now I do know. I know exactly what everyone's going to bowl at the end. "And if I can get down to it on the full, get it over fine leg and then every bowler is going to absolutely not know what to do." That theory sat and slowly fermented over time, but Campbell said he never practised the shot. "I didn't want to make a fool of myself," he said. "Because I felt, if I tried it, every chance I was going to get hit in the head — and that's why in all honesty I named it 'Stupidity'. While he never practised the shot, he had thought a lot about the technique he would use if he ever tried it in a match. His theory was to feign a move to the leg side, forcing the bowler to attempt a yorker. "And once that happened, I just had to get low enough and I had to get my head as close to the line of the ball as possible, 'cause if I watch the ball onto the bat, I just felt I was never going to miss it," Campbell said. "I wanted to hit it on the full that was the whole thing, in a perfect world, I'm going to hit that ball on the full." That was the theory and in December 2002 while Campbell was playing a state one-day match for Western Australia and Victoria, the opportunity arose to put the plan into action. Campbell was batting and as he tells it, his Victorian wicketkeeping counterpart, Darren Berry, was mercilessly sledging him. "He was having a crack at me, I was having a crack at him and Ian Harvey was bowling," Campbell said. That Ian Harvey was bowling was another factor in Campbell's favour. The two had been at the Australian Cricket Academy together and so Campbell knew Harvey's tricks — like his preference for bowling slow yorkers at the end of one-day matches. "And I'm thinking: 'right I'm going to try and hit Darren Barry right in the face here and give every cricketer a break from his mouth constantly yapping'," Campbell said. "And that was what I needed to try it, and basically I tried it twice in the over. "Unfortunately, I missed Darren's mouth, but it kept going for four and I thought to myself I'm onto something." The shot Campbell called "Stupidity" was born. A week later, Campbell got a late call-up to play for Australia A against Sri Lanka. With instructions from his captain Justin Langer to bat aggressively, he decided the time was right to play a shot he'd only tried once before. "You know, here it is, fine leg's up mid-off, mid-on back, time to try and do it," Campbell said. "I just felt that my theory was sound, and I had proven to myself the week before that it worked and you know, put your money where your mouth is so to speak, and the rest, as they say, is history." Back in the dressing room, his teammates were agog. "There was a lot of conversation of 'what was that?'" he said "They're asking me the theory and all this sort of stuff, and I joked around of course about trying to hit Darren the week before. "And you know it was nice to hear them say well 'the theory is sound'. "I think that's where the word got around, and you know people started to do it more and more." Is he proud of his legacy in the game? "Oh yeah of course," he said "You know I didn't get to play one million games for Australia or anything like that … I wasn't a headline act. I was sort of a guy who did well for his state. "But you know, to be remembered a little bit because I invented something then yeah, of course, that you know tells me that I had the courage of my convictions. I guess doing the ramp was something that I'm very proud of." But unknown to Campbell, almost two years before, an unheralded wicketkeeper/batsman from Zimbabwe had tried the same thing. On January 2, 2001, Doug Marillier played a ramp shot in a one-day match in Taupo against New Zealand fast-bowler Chris Martin. Footage shows Marillier moving subtly to the off-side, just before Martin bowled. "He bowled a sort of hip-high full toss to try to follow me, but because I'd baulked inside it, I was now on the inside the ball and I just tapped the ball and it went over the short fine leg for four," Marillier told ABC Sport from Harare. "I didn't call it a ramp, I called it a sweep shot," he said. Marillier said he had never seen anyone play his version of the "sweep" shot before, but he thought he was on to something. "So, I started hitting the ball in the nets," he said. "As long as your head was on the inside of the ball, really there was no risk in terms of the shot being played." Echoing Campbell, he said knowing the bowler was going to bowl full and straight at the end of the innings, gave him an advantage. "Unfortunately, I'm not very good at hitting the ball over mid-off, so I had to come up with something else," he said. "To a certain extent, it was quite easy to play because you knew where the ball was going to be before the bowler let it go. Later that January, Zimbabwe toured Australia for a triangular one-day tournament that included the West Indies. Marillier wasn't selected until the final match of the tournament against Australia in Perth on February 4. Batting second, Zimbabwe was chasing Australia's 302. Marillier came in with the score on 288 with Zimbabwe needing 15 runs to win off the final over of the match. He was facing one of the all-time greats, Glenn McGrath. Earlier, Marillier had told his teammates that he was going to use his "sweep" shot against McGrath. "The guys who were in the change room with me were a bit agitated by that because obviously they were saying: 'don't be ridiculous, you're not going to sweep Glenn McGrath, that's ridiculous'," Marillier said. "But really that was the only option." It's exactly what he did — on the first ball of his innings, the first time he'd faced Glenn McGrath and in his first innings of the tour. McGrath bowled a full toss just outside off stump, allowing Marillier to move way across to the offside and scoop the ball over fine leg to the boundary. Bill Lawry in commentary was typically excitable: "Oooh he's got it away, good cricket. Well, what a good start. You're facing McGrath for the first time, you need 15 off the over. You take a chance. You move across to the off-side and you chip him away." Two balls later, Marillier played an identical shot over the head of fine leg who was still up in the circle, leaving Zimbabwe with three balls to score five runs to win. Slow motion shots show Glenn McGrath walking back to his mark shaking his head in what seems to be a mixture of disgust and disbelief. "Might be his only shot. It's a beauty," said Lawry in commentary. Unfortunately, Marillier couldn't make it three out of three and Zimbabwe ended up losing by one run. "It would have been nice to beat Australia at the WACA," he said. But he's proud of what he did — if understated. "Yeah, nice to have hit McGrath for four, let alone where it goes. Most of the time it goes to the slips," he said. As for the reaction, he said it was typically muted especially among the cricket traditionalists. "Some of the older, more traditional commentators in the game were like, 'yeah, it's a flash in the pan kind of shot, it's not the kind of shot you can do regularly because bowlers will work you out," Marillier said. He said he also copped criticism from his coaches when he was practising the shot. "In the nets when you're doing it, and the coaching staff are saying 'you're just messing around'," he said. "You know, 'you should be hitting the ball down the ground, or you should practice more orthodox shots'. "But I played it enough in the nets for me at least to seem that it was a real option because I didn't get it wrong that much. "Once it had been played, there could be no argument about whether or not it works," he said. Marillier was confident in his theory and technique and showed it to devastating effect a year later in March 2002 in a match against India in Faridabad. Coming in at number 10, Marillier played the ramp shot four times in a stunning innings of 56 off just 24 balls to steal a remarkable victory for Zimbabwe. Some of those shots look identical to the modern ramp shot that sends the ball directly over the keeper. "It was played so many times that it proved that as long as the fine leg is up, it's a really effective shot and it's really hard to bowl to," Marillier said. He said that innings proved the shot could be played against both short and full balls and helped create awareness about the ramp in India. "I think if you're bat's in the right place and your head's in the right place, then there's not a lot of risk to you." Marillier is extremely humble if somewhat rueful that he's only remembered for his improvisation that became known for a time as the "Marillier Shot". He stopped playing international cricket when he was just 24 and now runs a successful property business in Harare. "I think a lot of people play the shot (and) they wouldn't have a clue who Douglass Marillier is because I wasn't on the scene for long enough," he said. "It's nice from a cricketing point of view to have had an opportunity to do something to be remembered with." So, who invented the ramp shot? Was it Douglass Marillier or Ryan Campbell? There's little doubt that Marillier played a version of the shot almost two years before Campbell. But Campbell is adamant that he'd never seen Marillier, let alone heard of him. "I'll be honest I didn't watch a lot of cricket back then … the last thing you wanted to do as a cricketer was watch more," Campbell said. "So yeah, I hadn't seen it and that's the honest truth. "But you know if he did it before me, then you know, good on him," Cambell said. It seems two gifted cricketers had independently tapped into something that was needed to take the game of cricket forward. There's a precedent: In the late 17th Century, two famous mathematicians, Sir Issac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, butted up against the limits of their field and independently came up with Calculus — a fundamental method of mathematics that's vital for physics, engineering and other sciences. The ramp was a shot borne out of necessity to counter defensive full-length bowling in limited overs cricket matches. But it can only have happened at a time when one-day cricket was evolving — becoming far more attacking — and batters were looking to play more aggressively with more licence to take risks. Just as Newton and Leibniz had stood on the shoulders of earlier, Greek, Chinese and Arab mathematicians, Marillier and Campbell's ramp shot came after the advent other innovative shots like the reverse sweep and the slash over slips. The ramp shot is the solution to a question that only in hindsight seems obvious. But maybe not. In the 1870's, the legendary Aboriginal cricketer Unaarrimin, known as Johnny Mullagh, was famous for his daring deflections. "Dropping on one knee to a fast rising ball, he would hold his bat over his shoulder and parallel to the ground," DJ Mulvaney writes in his history of the Indigenous cricket tour to England, Cricket Walkabout. "The ball would touch the blade, and shoot high over the wicket-keeper's head to the boundary." Perhaps there's nothing new in the world.