What if spinners were allowed to flex their arms 20 degrees while bowling?
January 25, 2012
One midwinter English Sunday, two arresting sporting headlines -
neither, pluckily, having anything whatsoever to do with f**tball.
Tucked away in the bottom left corner at the front of the latest Sunday Times
sports section, beneath the acres given over to "Kenny Blasts Reds" and
"Dalglish threatens clear-out of 'unprofessional' players", lurked
"Robinson attacks 'arrogant' England" - the Robinson in question being
neither Nottinghamshire's Tim nor Sussex's Mark but Andy, the
English-born coach of Scotland's rugby union side. In the top left
corner, opposite "Magical Murray - Briton Storms Into Last 16 At The
Aussie Open", lurked "Fanning The Flames - Trott Voices New Suspicion
Over Pakistan Spinner".
As a snapshot of Blighty's sporting fancies it was nothing if not
symbolic. Team games before individual, f**tball before all. As a
reflection of the lengths sportsfolk will go to secure an advantage, it
was just as telling.
Robinson's "attack" came a fortnight before Scotland meet - you guessed
it - England in the opening match of the Six Nations championship, that
annual scrap to prove who's the best in Europe but still a distant
second on the planet; Trott's "suspicion" during preparations for the
second Test against Pakistan. In both instances, not unnaturally, the
agitators were smarting from a humbling: Scotland's last encounter with
England, in October, had seen them beaten in the World Cup
quarter-finals; Trott and England had just been drubbed in Dubai.
Both headlines were broadly accurate; both, as is the way of the media
world, masked thin but provocative stories, stories where the headline
is the story. Robinson's allegation about the arrogance of those
accursed English ruckers was entirely unspecific. He used the word, yes,
but resolutely declined to go a zillimetre further. Trott's "suspicion"
(which wasn't exactly "new") proved to be little more than a sliver of a
scintilla of a hint, albeit a politically correct one: "From what the
guys are hearing… and are talking about, we can't make any accusations
before the guy has been tested. The ICC have got their job to do and we
trust they will be able to do it." Then he covered his tracks a bit
more: "There is going to be speculation around his action… [but] it
would be foolish for us every time we face him to think he's suspect."
All of which ran somewhat counter to Graeme Swann's assertion in his Saturday morning column for the Sun, to wit: "Some people are talking about [Saeed] Ajmal's
action but it's not a topic of conversation in our dressing room." He
has tried to bowl a doosra himself, Swann related, but couldn't do so
"without bending my elbow". Meanwhile, Andy Flower was adding his
ha'pworth: "I've got my own private views and talking about them here
and now isn't going to help the situation."
Everyone, in other words, was steering that narrow course between libel
action and the inalienable right of sportsfolk to play mind games,
however ineptly. Call it the Doosra Dance. Call it the game within the
game within the game. Boxing, which has always had one foot in the sham
of showbiz, led the way. Stirring the pot has been part and parcel of
the pre-match ritual for time almost immemorial, but as the stakes rose,
so the press became more brazen; and as radio, television, internet and
social media multiplied the megaphones, so the vigour and wattage rose.
The philosophy became part Machiavelli, part Malcolm X: get under the
opposition's skin by any means necessary. The lawyers quietened things
down but the sound of sniping still reverberates. It's in the script.
Greg Chappell characterised this inner-inner game with typical
succinctness long ago. On the eve of the final Test of the 1982-83 Ashes
series in Sydney, where victory for the outclassed tourists would have
kept the urn in English hands, captain Bob Willis, happy to kindle
memories of Australia's gobsmacking collapses at Headingley and
Edgbaston 18 months earlier, said he would rather Australia bat last,
obviously. The riposte from his opposite number was as firm and straight
and true as one of Chappell's on-drives: "That's just propaganda."
The difference in Ajmal's case is that Flower, Swann and Trott (and Matt
Prior for that matter) had two other factors to contend with as they
contemplated airing their views. First, they would be accusing a fellow
professional of cheating, still widely considered the most dastardly of
sporting crimes, even among those horrified by match-fixing. Second, by
questioning Ajmal's action, or even alluding to any dubiousness, they
ran the risk of being seen as whingeing Poms, whether of the
Northamptonian or southern African variety. They also knew a swift but
polite "no comment" would have sufficed. Swann, presumably, has some
control over what goes out under his name, so he could have ignored the
matter altogether. The Sun's sports editor might not have liked
it but he'd have had to lump it. Instead, all three chose to fan the
flames behind a veil of respectability, the better to unsettle.
WHICH LEADS US, INEVITABLY, to the bigger question. Not whether
all is fair in love, war and ballgames, but whether bending the elbow
beyond the permissible 15 degrees might actually be more acceptable in a
spinner. To propose this, of course, should in no way be seen as a
desire to see a new generation of Tony Locks wreck stumps and wreak
havoc with 80mph "faster" balls, prompting victims to surmise - as Doug
Insole did so volubly after being castled by the Surrey southpaw - that
they could only have been run out.
In June 2009, a batch of eminent Australian spinners, including Shane
Warne, Stuart MacGill, Ashley Mallett and the late Terry Jenner,
gathered in Brisbane for a grandiloquently dubbed "Spin Summit". All
condemned the doosra. "There was unanimous agreement that [it] should
not be coached in Australia," wrote Mallett in the Adelaide Review.
"I have never seen anyone actually bowl the doosra. It has to be a
chuck. Until such time as the ICC declares that all manner of chucking
is legal in the game of cricket I refuse to coach the doosra. All at the
Spin Summit agreed." Principle was surely the cause; the only other
interpretation is that they didn't want their records broken.
A couple of months earlier, by way of context, Ajmal had been reported
by the umpires following an ODI against Australia in Dubai. An expert
in biomechanics, however, gave his doosra the all-clear, and, so far as
we know, the charge has never been repeated. Muttiah Muralitharan and
Harbhajan Singh were both reported before the degree of flexibility was
justly raised from 10 degrees - on the basis that just about every ball
ever recorded on film would otherwise have been illegal - but not
thereafter. To my knowledge no official aspersions were ever cast about
the doosra wielded so wickedly by its inventor, Saqlain Mushtaq.
| Should the regulations distinguish between spinners and quicks? Given that there is an appreciable gap between the intent and potential physical ramifications of a 95mph "chuck" and a 60mph one, this does not seem unreasonable | |||
All of which would suggest: a) half a dozen degrees of flex are
indiscernible to the naked eye, and b) there are oodles of people, many
of them umpires, who believe not only that it is entirely possible to
bowl such a ball legitimately but that it is done so with considerable
regularity. In their refusal to coach it (not, one imagines, that they
could so without a scary amount of homework, seldom something that comes
naturally to retired luminaries), Warne et al are almost certainly
doing their heirs a grave disservice.
But let's just say, strictly for the sake of argument, that Ajmal's
right arm does stray fractionally beyond that prescribed limit. Should
the regulations, in this respect, distinguish between spinners and
quicks? Given that there is an appreciable gap between the intent and
potential physical ramifications of a 95mph "chuck" and a 60mph one,
this does not seem unreasonable. Why not a 15-degree leeway for one and
20 for the other? It was only a few years back, after all, that the ICC
deemed such a differential - five degrees for pacemen, ten for twirlers -
right and proper. Offspinners, of course, are entitled to raise another
point: why, unlike their wrist-flexing brothers-in-arms and charms,
should they be denied the right to bowl a wrong'un?
The sentiments of Bernard Bosanquet, proud parent of the wrong'un, ring
down the ages with a deafening echo. "Poor old googly!" he lamented in
the 1925 Wisden. "It has been subjected to ridicule, abuse,
contempt, incredulity, and survived them all. Nowadays one cannot read
an article on cricket without finding that any deficiencies […] are
attributed to the influence of the googly. If the standard of bowling
falls off, it is because too many cricketers devote their time to trying
to master it [...] If batsmen display a marked inability to hit the
ball on the offside, or anywhere in front of the wicket, and stand in
apologetic attitudes before their wicket, it is said that the googly has
made it impossible for them to adopt the old aggressive attitude and
make the old scoring strokes. But, after all, what is the googly? It is
merely a ball with an ordinary break produced by an extra-ordinary
method."
So it all boils down, in essence, to the Googly Question: would you
prefer the game to remain rigid and obstinate, clinging fast to
traditional notions of what is far and unfair, and hence stagnate, or
encourage the expansion of horizons? In other words, would we be better
off with or without the doosra? You don't have to be a fully qualified
Luddite to reply in the negative, but it helps.
Rob Steen is a sportswriter and senior lecturer in sports journalism at the University of Brighton