More than Muralitharan; bigger than Bedi

This still does not rule out the possibility that in the heat of battle Murali may consciously or unaware, flex his arm to really rip the doosra. Bedi has made a serious point about the supervision of the game in general, not just the matter of policing Murali which the ICC needs to take seriously. Murali isn’t responsible for his imitators, but the ICC’s rulings change cricket from the highest level to the lowest, and I’ve seen children in neighbourhood parks manage very creditable imitations of Murali’s bowling style, happily bending and straightening their arms because they know its allowed on television. When Bedi says the ICC has created a monster, he doesn’t mean that Murali has horns: he’s being metaphorical.

But Bedi doesn’t seem to realize that what really annoys Murali’s fans and supporters is the implication that the ICC introduced the 15 degree rule to fit Murali in. The truth is that to start with the ICC introduced differential limits of flexion (5 degrees for spinners, 7.5 degrees for medium pacers, 10 degrees for fast bowlers) and when the unfairness and impracticality of this was pointed out, abandoned this plan. The fifteen degree rule happened after a study of the actions of international bowlers revealed that nearly every bowler bent and straightened his arm, including fast-bowling paragons like Glenn McGrath. Critics of Murali like Holding did an about-face when shown the evidence and by and large, the cricket world followed suit.

I asked Bedi what he thought of the finding that nearly everyone chucked, including bowlers who had never come close to being called like McGrath and Gillespie. Bedi dismissed the point. McGrath’s bowling action, he asserted, was pure (his word) and the only way you could judge the legality of a bowler’s delivery was relying on the human eye. McGrath looked legal, so he was legal.

Oddly enough, this is very close to the position the ICC took when it introduced the fifteen degree law. The ICC’s justification for flexion up to fifteen degrees is the argument that till that point (15 degrees), the human eye can’t see the bending and straightening that occurs. It’s only the modern camera that can catch that kink in a bowler’s action. The ICC is looking for historical continuity: it is implying that the 15 degree rule isn’t sanctioning a new era of chuckers: it is merely formalising a ‘flexion’ that always existed in international cricket but which couldn’t be discerned or measured because we didn’t have modern cameras and the apparatus of sports science.

Not unnaturally, Bedi isn’t keen to buy this argument. Bedi, by near-universal agreement, had one of the loveliest slow bowling actions in the history of the game and he refuses to accept that he and his spinning contemporary were actually chuckers but didn’t know it. He didn’t turn the ball much and a bit of ‘flexion’ might have helped him turn it more, but that didn’t fall within his understanding of the dharma of a bowler (as it was then defined) and he thinks that the ICC’s present permissiveness has slighted cricket’s entire history and the first principles of his craft.

It doesn’t help that the ICC’s rationalisation of the 15 degree rule doesn’t seem to work in real life. I think I can see the kink in Brett Lee’s action, and Harbhajan’s and Shoaib Akhtar’s. So do many other people. Either they’re bending and straightening their arms more than the allowed fifteen degrees and getting away with it or flexion below that fifteen degree ceiling is also visible, which makes a nonsense of the ICC’s rationale for that number. If it’s the latter, then it means that bowlers are getting away with more today than they were getting away with in the past.

Instead of going after Murali as the symbol of modern cricketing decadence, Bedi should be asking the ICC to publish the results of the survey of bowling actions that it undertook, complete with names and degrees of flexion. If it’s technically possible, the sports science boffins should look at older films, say Bedi’s bowling action, and tell us what degree of flexion they found. Once we have numbers on which bowler flexed his arm and by how much, we’ll be in a position to judge whether ICC should bend the rules (as it has done) to fit bowling ‘reality’ or whether bowlers will have to adapt their actions to fit a enforceable ideal. If, for example, a bowler like Jimmy Anderson is found to have flexed his arm appreciably less than, say, Brett Lee, then the ICC needs to lower its level of tolerance to Anderson’s level and force Lee to make changes in his action to conform. Similarly, if to bowl his doosra (or his pehla for that matter) Murali has to flex his arm more than, say, Ramesh Powar, the rules of the game should force him to alter his action. It’s worth remembering that this is exactly what Tony Lock had to do. An attacking left arm spinner, he changed his action in the mid-Fifties after he was called for bowling his faster ball and was never quite the same bowler again.

On the other hand, if the ICC conducts a systematic study of bowling actions past and present and publishes its results, and if these results validate Lee’s action and Muralitharan’s (to name two bowlers, one fast and one slow, whose bowling actions have caused comment) by showing that bowling actions were always thus and it is only modern cameras that highlight kinks which had hitherto blushed unseen, then the ICC could specify a historically consistent level of flexion and dissenters like Bedi and Crowe would have to fall in line or run the risk of being seen as cricket’s cranks, not its conscience-keepers.

Till this happens, we’ll continue to be treated to the depressing spectacle of a magical bowler being singled out and hounded for a system-wide problem. And now, thanks to Muralitharan’s lawyers, we are faced with the squalid prospect of the greatest slow left arm bowler of our times, being sued for speaking his mind (even if we allow that he tends to call a spade a shovel). Muralitharan’s claim to being considered the greatest bowler of all time won’t be settled by a defamation suit. His place in cricket’s history, and cricket’s historical integrity, needs the intervention of the ICC.