From Darrel Hair’s disparaging comments against a few spinners, more specifically his labelling of Harbhajan Singh, Saqlain Mushtaq and Muttiah Muralitharan as ‘role models’ who have encouraged modern-day chucking in international cricket, it is rather obvious that he was looking back at his career and ruing the things he should have done rather than sit back and enjoy the benefits of being an international ICC umpire, raking in the moolah.
Splitting hair over what he says will be quite useless. It will, however, be interesting to study the impact of not calling chuckers chuckers.
If one were to apply the old rules on the javelin-like throws of the doosra bowlers who straightened their elbow through the delivery arc, it wouldn’t be rocket science to conclude that they were, in fact, throwing. Could one ever bowl a doosra without straightening the arm? The answer to that once-much-debated question became irrelevant after the law was amended. The question that is relevant today is, if these bowlers were chucking, why wasn’t something done about it and what was the damage of not putting the system right, a stitch in time saves nine, and all that?
Actually, something was done. Muttiah Muralitharan was called for chucking by umpire Darrell Hair at Melbourne, by Tony McQuillan and Ross Emerson in Brisbane, and by Ross Emerson in Adelaide. Other bowlers were reported, but not called. This got the ICC into a huddle and forced them to introspect about the future of cricket, and more specifically the future of chucking.
It was apparent to the cricket fraternity that with the advent of the helmet, placid batting tracks, incredibly powerful bats and extremely few fit bowlers hurling the ball at 90+ mph consistently, the game had tilted hugely in the batsmen’s favour. Add to this the fact that a mis-hit was clearing the boundary, the restriction on bowling bouncers had killed the spirit of the quicks and the strict adherence by umpires of calling a wide if the delivery missed the leg stump by but an inch, and great bowlers started to disappear.
Fast bowlers now had to toil extra hard to make the slightest dent. Gone were the days of pushing the batsmen back, now they had to contend with the awfully embarrassing ‘Dilshan Scoop’, a shot that could never have been thought of in the golden days of the beautiful sport once played by amateurs. The quicks strained harder, which led to injuries.
With time, the situation became so bad that if one looked through a magnifying glass, you couldn’t find a team to compare with the fearsome pace attacks of old. The sad plight of the bowlers didn’t go unnoticed. The cricketing fraternity realised that something had to be done to level the playing field, bring the game back on even keel. And so a 15-degree bend in the elbow was allowed.
I remember doing a column when that happened, and stated the dangers of implementing such a law. How was the umpire to judge if the bend was 1 degree in excess of limits allowed? That the elbow was straightening through an arc of 16 degrees and not 15 degrees?
Desperate to get some advantage back to the bowlers, keeping the larger interest of the game in mind, the decision-makers allowed the new law to settle in and ratified that the javelin-throwers were above board and more than welcome in cricket. The wickets taken by them till the amendment were left legitimised.
The new law established itself, and the doosra was taught at every level by the coaches. Budding bowlers, barely between ten and twelve, were now aggressively being shown the science of chucking.
Everything was hunky-dory, till the Saeed Ajmal fiasco.
That he is a brilliant bowler is not doubted. Yet he was banned for chucking without much debate, leaving a few of us asking the question, why the haste to ratify Muralitharan’s wickets as legal and ban Ajmal for chucking?
It was apparent to even the novice that the hundreds of Test wickets taken by Muralitharan before the law was amended were, in fact, illegal. Couldn’t the law have been amended to meet with the Ajmal chuck? If not, why? Surely the difference between 15 and 25 degrees is just an additional 10 degrees of chuck.
