For some 20 years now, Daryl Foster has manned cricket's primary help-desk for suspect bowling actions. Foster's work in the area began in 1995 with Muttiah Muralitharan and has carried on without pause, taking in the likes of Shoaib Akhtar, Saeed Ajmal, Marlon Samuels, and Sachithra Senanayake.
As one of cricket's foremost bio-mechanical experts, Foster — along with Professor Bruce Elliott and Assoc. Prof. Jacque Alderson — has tested, analysed, re-worked and improved countless bowling actions at the University of Western Australia which, until it stopped being an ICC-accredited lab in September last year, was the only such centre in the world.
As a coach, Foster had stints with Western Australia (20 years), Kent, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
Now an Adjunct Professor at the University, the 76-year-old sits down to discuss Ajmal, the impact of T20 cricket on chucking, says why fast bowlers must also be watched and why Asian bowlers can deliver the doosra legally.
Excerpts :
The beginning
I was coaching in Kent in 1995 and our overseas player was Aravinda de Silva. He rang me up and said: 'Can I bring a young off-spin bowler to Kent to train?' and that was Murali. He was going to the Leicester leagues but he came to Kent and did a pre-season with us in 1995. Later on that year, he was called by Darrell Hair at the MCG. And then he came over here for testing and that's when the testing of legality of bowlers began really. That's the history of it. We've had about 50 or 60 of the world's bowlers through since 1995 – some under-19, some female, and the Harbhajans, the Ajmals, the Marlon Samuelses and the Shillingfords.
Can re-modelled actions be effective?
Absolutely. I don't see any reason why they can't. If you're bowling with a completely remodeled action, like Ajmal evidently is, it can be difficult but if it's only a small adjustment, bowlers can usually adjust quite quickly. Senanayake for instance – he took about three months of solid Remediation work to get to a point where he could be tested again and found to be okay. Every bowler has different problems which take different time spans to rectify. But there is no reason why a bowler judged to be suspect cannot make it back as a legal bowler.
The ICC crackdown
The Cricket Committee of the ICC decided that there were too many suspect bowlers playing in world cricket. Obviously they had Ajmal in mind. In the meantime the Umpires also reported Senanayake and other bowlers from Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. I think umpires feel more confident of looking at an off-spinner because they imagine they can see (a kink in the arm). There's no problem with that (leg-breaks). But what they haven't cracked down on is the bowling of quicker bouncers (by fast bowlers) from a front-on bowling action. It is very easy to come through and bend your arm when you want to bowl a bouncer. I think there have been bowlers in the past – and I certainly won't name them – that have made a living out of bowling a quicker bouncer. The batsman just top-edges it. You can't increase your pace by say 10km an hour without doing something different. There's room to have a look at that. That's a bit harder to spot than action of the off-spinner.
Shoaib Akhtar
When we had bowlers like Shoaib and others, not only did we decide whether they were illegal or legal but we also tried to make them better bowlers. Not only did we say that Shoaib is legal because of this enormous hyper-extension that he's got but if we can get his arm up a little higher, he'll get more lift and be a better bowler.
Lillee, who was also involved with him, thought it would take him six months and I reckoned I would take him two days. And it only took him two days. The reason was that Shoaib didn’t begin bowling faster until he was 18 or 19 years of age and therefore had not developed ingrained bad habits. He could understand that if he used his front arm a little bit better,then his bowling arm will be a little higher. Lillee was amazed that he could effect those changes so quickly.
T20 cricket
T20 cricket has had an enormous effect on off-spin bowlers, in particular, developing faults. Senanayake is a good example as he was opening the bowling and then bowling at the death. What happens is they get to a point in their delivery, then the batsman steps away to the leg-side or off-side or gets down on one knee to reverse sweep. To counteract that, he pauses a little bit in his action, just develops a bit of a kink, and fires it in. If you try and spin the ball too hard, if you try and bowl a little bit quicker there is a risk that you may bend your elbow a little bit more and therefore develop, too much extension. So I think T20 cricket has had a huge impact on many spin bowlers.
Can you bowl the doosra without chucking?
Yes I believe you can. But, probably only people from the sub-continent can do it, probably, because they've got different flexibility. The Caucasian bowler is usually more muscled as he probably does more weights and he's pretty strong through (the arm) and shoulder but he's not in my experience as flexible as bowlers from the sub-continent. Murali bowled it effectively, Saqlain bowled it. But Johan Botha couldn’t and other Caucasian bowlers can’t bowl it. So it’s my thought that if there’s a skilled and flexible bowler from the sub-continent he probably can bowl a legal doosra .
Muralitharan
When Murali came here for the second time – when only his doosra was reported – he was tested at 14 degrees. And he said that’s too high. What can we do? We worked at a local park in Perth having 2 sessions a day for 2 weeks and we were able to reduce his Doosra extension value to under 10 degrees. He was running in at to a steep angle, about 45 degrees which was straightened considerably which enabled him to bowl with a more side-on action . These are very simple things that can be done. I haven’t met a bowler yet who I thought deliberately set out to throw. It’s usually just bad habits which develop over a period of time.
The doubters
The thing that I am most disappointed with is that we should have explained more clearly to the cricket world why Murali was not a “chucker thereby hopefully convincing and the many doubters that Murali was not a suspect bowler. At UWA we were working for the ICC and it was confidential. We did the testing, send the results to the ICC and they inform the country concerned and announce the results, We should have been more to the forefront and explained to people why Murali was not a chucker, and what having your arm permanently bent 38 degrees and a carry angle of 17 degrees means. He is as clean as anyone because he doesn’t alter that angle. All his spin came from his shoulder and his wrist. But we should have explained it a heap better.
You have to conduct a 3D analysis to be absolutely sure a proper analysis of a bowlers action is achieved —you can never completely trust what you are seeing using your normal eyesight.
The 15-degree rule
There has always been this mistaken belief in the press that the 15 degrees rule was brought in for Murali. It was brought at a meeting in Dubai of the ICC Cricket committee so that the majority of the world's bowlers fitted in under that 15 degrees. It is in my opinion a reasonable limit and better than what they had initially: 8 degrees for this and 10 for that and 12 for that. So 15 is a reasonable standard to be able to maintain. There were some members of the Committee who believed it should be zero degrees.
Testing results of icon bowlers from all over the world were shown to bowl with 7, 8, 10 degrees of extension. So all of a sudden the Committee had to come to some sort of compromise which was 15 degrees of extension for all bowling techniques.
Ajmal's case
I have tremendous sympathy for any bowler that’s called. Ajmal doesn’t want to be out of the game and Pakistan can't afford for him to be out of the game. He carried Pakistan in all forms of cricket for four or five years. It’s five years ago since he was tested here, so I don’t know how many games he has played or how many balls he has bowled at practice in that 5 year period but the number of deliveries in all cricket he played —Test, One-Day and 20/20 would be quite substantial. I just think he developed bad habits over a period of time with Twenty20 cricket contributing to this.
