What's the solution to illegal bowling?

Cricket administrators are renowned for their sagacity, and as ICC big cheese, Dave Richardson is the uber pen-pusher, the bureaucrats' bureaucrat, the Socrates of cricket. Like all wise men, he has the ability to reduce complex problems to their essence. So what's the solution to illegal bowling?

"Pick people who can bowl legally."

Clearly, Dave belongs to that proud philosophical tradition of resolving apparently insoluble difficulties with deceptively simple prescriptions, known as the Marie Antoinette School. And he's got more advice where that came from.

"Don't pick people who have got suspicious actions."

Granted, this can be a useful rule of thumb. In 1924, the MCC saved itself a great deal of embarrassment when it left Crooked Sid Cruikshanks out of the Ashes squad after watching a demonstration of his patented "elbow twizzler", in which he propelled the ball from the back of his hand by dislocating his arm mid-delivery.

This rule can also stop the unwary selector from picking players whose methods are legal yet nonetheless highly suspicious, such as the legspinner who approaches the wicket skipping in a spiral pattern while reciting the theme song from popular 1980s Boston-based comedy Cheers, or the medium-pacer who incorporates a Nazi salute into his delivery stride.

But what about players whose actions look a bit like chucking but turn out to be fine? It's here that the Richardson Law can't help us. By strapping players to machines and measuring the extent of their kink, we have moved on from the days when an umpire had to decide whether or not to end a player's career in the humiliation of the recurring no-ball.

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, it might be a duck. On the other hand, it might be a swan with a growth hormone disorder, or an aquatic chicken. The point is, as with so much in life, you can't tell just by looking.

So since we have the technology, why do we still rely on the naked eye? Why not just refer every bowler, once a year, whether they look dodgy or not. After all, since every bowler bends their arm slightly on delivery, they are all potential wrong 'uns. This would end the drama of naming and shaming, and the unedifying spectacle of internet trolls pushing cropped photos of bent arms via social media, as well as clearing the reek of stigma that hangs around the career of the referred player.

So if we want to end the menace of slightly bent bowling elbows, all we have to do is to make the trip to the chucking centre to have your arm measured with a spirit level as routine to the international cricketer as urinating in a sample jar, tweet-endorsements, and trying to avoid an interview with Mark Nicholas.