Dexter condemns Hussain's leg theory in India

The MCC president, Ted Dexter, has gone on record as saying that Nasser Hussain, the England captain, might have kept to the letter of the law when he told left-arm spinner Ashley Giles to bowl over the wicket into the leg-side rough against Sachin Tendulkar in the Test series against India, but he was outside the spirit of the law.

Now, Dexter believes that there needs to be a revision of the laws by MCC, and he is supported in that by the game's governing body, the International Cricket Council. The ICC has been in touch suggesting that MCC might look at ways of closing this particular loophole that allows negative tactics to be employed.

The tactics employed by Hussain attracted widespread condemnation, especially in India where Sunil Gavaskar, one of the country's greatest batsmen and now both a media personality and chairman of the ICC cricket committee, tagged England as "boring."

Dexter, who was himself an innovative captain of England, said that leg-side bowling represented "a matter of pushing the laws to their limit to gain advantage."

He continued: "The umpires could have been stricter on the leg-side wide, and what we detected was an anomaly in the ICC playing conditions - just one sentence - which allowed the umpires not to intervene.

"Since then we've been in touch with ICC - I've been in touch personally with Sunil Gavaskar - and we've corresponded.

"We're thrilled that the ICC has asked the MCC for our proposals as to how to deal with it properly in the laws and the playing conditions, and we'll see where we go from here."

Some critics suggested that the tactic had actually cost England the chance of squaring the series in the final Test in Bangalore. Tendulkar faced 198 balls for 90 before Giles had him stumped, but time was on India's side even before rain came to wash out any chance of a positive result.

Nevertheless, Hussain's plan was designed specifically to counter Tendulkar in the prevailing conditions and, if the fault lay with the ICC playing conditions as Dexter maintains, it seems strange that the laws of cricket should be amended rather than the faulty playing conditions.