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In June 2005, Pakistan defeated the West Indies by 136 runs in Jamaica to level the two-test series, the hosts having won the first game by 276 runs in Barbados. Leg spinner Danish Kaneria overcame a fearful pasting in the first innings from Brian Lara to snare five wickets in the second and the man-of-the-match award; Younis Khan made a hundred in the first innings; and captain Inzamam-ul-Haq showed his appreciation of Courtney Browne's benevolence in dropping him before he had scored by scoring a century that gave his team what turned out to be a match-winning lead.
Another very significant contributor to Pakistan's victory in Kingston was fast bowler Shabbir Ahmed. His eight wickets in the match came at less than 15 runs apiece and included Lara for 153 in the first innings, just as the gluttonous left-hander was threatening to erect a roadblock of runs to bar any possibility of a Pakistan win.
Standing at 65 and generating high bounce and considerable seam movement, if not scorching pace, the Pakistani pacer proved a very troublesome bowler. Yet, threatening deliveries notwithstanding, the thing that stood out to those of us paying attention during that 2005 visit to the West Indies was the obvious and violent flexing of his elbow.
By December that same year Shabbir had already played his last test. After a game against England in Multan in November he was reported for the fourth time in his brief career for having a suspect action, and never made a return to the international arena. The word from an umpire in the know was that tests revealed that the pacer contravened the law by more than twice the allowed limit.
Fifty-one wickets from 10 matches showed that Shabbir provided very good service to his country. He was, in fact, along with the great Waqar Younis, the quickest Pakistani to 50 test wickets. He was on the winning side in six of the tests he played and took five or more wickets in five of those games, and so it is clear that the lanky fast bowler had a telling effect on the fortunes of his team.
There is, however, some matters worth considering: does it matter that he might have done all the damage he did with an illegal bowling action? How fair is it to the teams he helped defeat and the batsmen he dismissed that he was breaking the rules of the game? And would he have been as effective had he operated within the laws of the game?
During the first test of the Tendulkar farewell series in November 2013, Indian opener, Murali Vijay, was totally flummoxed by a Shane Shillingford doosra. As he began his walk back to the pavilion after being stumped for 26, the batsman could be seen mimicking the bowlers action, probably castigating himself for missing the clues that would have allowed him to identify the away spinning delivery.
A few months later Shillingfords doosra was outlawed. Considering that the Indian batsmen did not have much trouble scoring runs in that series, shouldn't Vijay feel that he was robbed of a possible big innings by a delivery that should have been prohibited?
Athletes and teams that medal in the Olympics will have their names removed, and their medals revoked -- even years after the event -- if it is found they contravened the laws of the sport.
That does not happen in cricket. And so there is no recourse available to an aggrieved batsman dismissed by an illegal delivery or an aggrieved team partially defeated by a chucker.
Far from solving the problem, the ICC's decision to allow bowlers to straighten or bend their elbow by up to 15 degrees has facilitated the emergence of a host of mystery bowlers with actions that look, to the naked eye at least, highly suspicious. And during the recent T20 WC they were out in full force. Martin Crowe, in a Cricinfo article, mentioned spinners with plenty of elbow grease, while Shane Warne, in a commentary stint during the West Indies/Pakistan game, offered that Pakistan spinner Saeed Ajmal likes his long sleeves.
Some time ago, former West Indies spinner Sonny Ramadhin came out and said that he always chucked his faster delivery, but was able to avoid detection by always wearing long sleeves. Long sleeves has become code, and is now often found in the same sentence as some of the well-known and not-so-well-known names of spinners with questionable actions.
The search for the doosra, that most potent weapon of the off-spinner, is probably one reason for the deterioration of bowling actions. The success of bowlers like Muttiah Muralitharan and Saeed Ajmal has prompted a new generation of bowlers to eschew the pure off-spinners action in favour of one more amenable to bowling the doosra, a delivery that some experts in the art, Bishen Bedi among them, are convinced cannot be sent down without bending the rules.
Not so according to the authorities. Tests have reportedly shown that the doosra can be delivered legally. Additionally, there are bowlers who have supposedly trod the straight and narrow after doing corrective work on their bowling action.
But who is to tell, in latest, if a bowler flexes his elbow in excess of the allowable 15 degrees? And when a bowler returns the game after doing remedial work, who is to say he will not revert to his old ways when engrossed in the heat of battle in the middle? Short of finding a way of measuring the degree of elbow flexing as the bowler delivers, this problem might be impossible to eliminate.
There were a number of bowlers with suspicious actions on show in Bangladesh throughout the T20 WC. Hopefully, by the time the teams gather in Australia and New Zealand for the 2015 World Cup their numbers would have dwindled.
