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THE CHUCKING CONTROVERSY

THE INTERNATIONAL CRICKET Council has been presented with a stark choice by the finding by a panel of former international cricketers: relax the existing rules that govern chucking or run the risk of having most bowlers banned from the game. The report prepared by the expert panel and endorsed by the ICC's Cricket Committee headed by Sunil Gavaskar has arrived at the startling conclusion that it is virtually impossible to perform a bowling action without some straightening of the arm. The conclusion, based on computerised tests conducted by biomechanists who assisted the panel, implies that there should be a paradigm shift in the manner in which cricket should approach the notoriously contentious issue of chucking. The new evidence suggests that bowlers can no longer be classified in terms of those who chuck and those who do not. Almost all bowlers `chuck', the difference lying only in the degree. Special cameras that film at 250 frames per second (in contrast with the 25 frames per second of television cameras) have revealed that the majority of contemporary bowlers bend their bowling arms in a manner that breaches the permissible limits. Quite remarkably, only one of the bowlers tested did not bend his arm at all while bowling: the part-time West Indian leg-spinner Ramnaresh Sarwan!

These findings have led the committee for reviewing bowling actions to recommend that all bowlers should be allowed to bend their arm (after it has reached the level of the shoulder in the delivery swing and until the point of delivery) to a maximum of 15 degrees. The suggestion, likely to be adopted at the ICC executive meeting in Australia in February 2005, is an improvement in two ways. It relaxes the definition of what is a legal delivery in a realistic way and it ends the irrational practice of fixing different norms for different categories of bowlers. Under the existing rule, introduced in 2001, the tolerance level is 10 degrees for fast bowlers, 7.5 degrees for medium-pacers, and 5 degrees for spinners. The proposed change in the bowling law is not (as has been made out in some quarters) a licence to throw. It is a necessary rationalisation in the face of compelling scientific evidence that the existing rule is simply nonsensical.

The rationalisation will legalise Muthiah Muralitharan's deceptive doosra, the off-spinner's wrong 'un that turns the other way. After the Sri Lankan bowler was reported for throwing his doosra, a biomechanics laboratory in the University of Western Australia established that his elbow straightened by 14 degrees and, after remediation, by 10 degrees — both figures a breach of the current permissible level. However, the report (first published in The Hindu and accessible at www.thehindu.com) prepared by the biomechanics experts recommended that Muralitharan should "be permitted to continue bowling his doosra" as it did not give him "an unfair advantage over batsman or other bowlers." Critics of the proposed 15 per cent rule, particularly those who paint the relaxation as a mere ruse to legitimise the off-spinner's doosra, fail to appreciate that the existing rule will disqualify most bowlers, including Glenn McGrath, Shaun Pollock, and Steve Harmison whose actions seem blameless to the naked eye. The relaxation should be viewed against a larger, praiseworthy aim — that of using modern technology, as opposed to individual judgment, to determine questions about chucking. Bowlers reported by umpires will first undergo a set of stringent ICC-administered laboratory tests and then be captured on high-speed video footage under match conditions to determine whether their action conforms or not. The chucking controversy, which has erupted time and again and soured cricketing relations between countries, is much better addressed through such a rigorous and scientific protocol.

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