Cricket's 'Chucking' Challenge
West Indian allrounder Marlon Samuels was recently reported for a suspect action while playing for Pune Warriors in the IPL
Carlyle Laurie
25-Feb-2013
West Indian allrounder Marlon Samuels was recently reported for a suspect action while playing for Pune Warriors in the IPL. Richard Lord in The Wall Street Journal reviews the current system of assessing the straightness of a bowlers arm. He says cricket is overly reliant on an imperfect gauge – the human eye – when other, more accurate methods of assessment are available.
The difference between a bent arm and one that straightens ought to be, well, straightforward. But judging with the naked eye how many degrees an arm has extended while taking issues such as abduction and wrist rotation into account, not so much. In other words, you can't trust the naked eye where chucking is concerned. So it's time to take the responsibility for reporting bowlers out of the hands of the on-field umpires, who have quite enough on their plate already and simply don't have the tools at their disposal to make a decision that could seriously affect someone's career.