Throwing out the stigma

It was reported several days ago that when Shoaib Akhtar finally decided to turn up at the conditioning camp going on in Lahore he twisted his ankle. Whilst Cricinfo mentioned this latest injury was not serious enough to rule him out of the England tour completely, I'm really not sure if that says a lot.

The Express is reporting today that Shoaib's recovery from his initial knee operation it self has been slower then the PCB medical panel expected. According to their "sources" he still has some swelling in that area which alone might take something like four to six weeks to disappear. Going by this, his chances of making it to the flight to London seem a far way of.

I suppose we can still hope till we hear some thing from some where more reliable then Express but you have to concede all the same that things aren't looking particularly good for the Rawalpindi Express, especially with Andy Roberts also having re-opened the seemingly never ending debate about his (and Brett Lee's) action.

Shehreyar Khan and Inzi as a result have had to in turn put up a public display of support for Shoaib highlighting how he's been cleared by the ICC and so on, but I'm not sure that's going to convince the likes of Roberts.

And I'm not even sure why we have to convince them. If Shoaib, Lee, or XYZ's action is illegal or not seems less relevant a question to me then why chucking is illegal in the first place. I've never really understood what prompts people think its so wrong to bowl with a bent arm anyway?

Yes, what's so wrong about it? If you can bat with a wrong technique and still get away it, and you can field like Monty Penesar and become "a cult figure" because of it, why the hell can't you bowl with a slightly bent arm?

What's so grossly immoral about it? The argument about it giving the bowler an unfair advantage doesn't stand in my opinion. It could be an advantage, but why it has to be branded unfair I will never know.

You have small grounds all over the world, you have grounds where bowlers have to bowl at road-like surfaces, you have batsmen that have heavier, bigger and more powerful bats then ever before, all of this gives the batsmen an advantage. I could well argue how much of this sounds very, very unfair to me, but that's not the point.

The game of cricket thrives on evolution. Several hundred years ago, under arm bowling was legal. In fact it was the only way you were allowed to bowl until some fine lady (bless her) decided to bowl overarm because of her "long, widely blousing dress" which was giving her difficulty in bowling with an underarm action.

Now, several hundreds years on, underarm bowling is illegal. But people like Shoaib Akhtar, Brett Lee and Murali are having trouble getting their versions of overarm bowling being accepted as legal. What is to say that many years further down the line, history wouldn't repeat it self and a form of bowling previously considered wrong and illegal would become widely accepted?

I'm not saying we'll have baseball like pitchers in cricket in future but some day I'm sure we'll learn to appreciate rather then criticize and condemn bent arm bowling. For all the Roberts, Holdings and so on that consider it their God given responsibility to protect the 'sanctity' of bowling, that day will be very scary.