The real mystery: Did Narine know he was chucking?

The thing with mystery bowlers is that their mystery doesn’t last forever. Sooner rather than later some batsman figures out the way to play them and then the word gets around. ‘Play him like a medium pacer,’ ‘Watch the ball out of the hand,’ ‘Play him like an off-spinner,’ ‘Attack.’ There is always a pattern, something that alerts the batsman to what is coming next. That takes the mystery out of them and reduces them to normal bowlers with no special aura or trick. It makes them hittable, it makes a liability. [caption id=“attachment_1742263” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File picture of Sunil Narine. AFP[/caption] In recent times, as the ICC’s crackdown on bowlers with errant actions continues, we have seen many bowlers including Saeed Ajmal being called for chucking. The West Indies spinner Sunil Narine - a mystery bowler - is the latest to join that list. His action was suspected to be illegal by the umpires during the CLT20 tournament in India. Narine, who plays for the Kolkata Knight Riders, was warned about his action during the final league match against the Sunfoil Dolphins. His bowling came under the scanner once again during the semi-final against the Hobart Hurricanes. And then he was banned from bowling in the final tonight. The West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) reacted to the developments by leaving out Narine from the touring party for the series against India. “The West Indies Cricket Board advised today that Sunil Narine has been withdrawn from the touring party for the upcoming series against India. This came after discussions including Narine, the WICB Selection Panel and the West Indies Team Management. The withdrawal from the upcoming tour will allow Narine the opportunity to have his action assessed and plan his return to cricket,” a West Indies cricket board media release stated. Now, there are three sides to this argument. The first side was stated by Rahul Dravid during his recent Dilip Sardesai lecture. “Personally I don’t think we should see chucking as a crime as such. It is just a technical fault that people have. So if you have a technical fault in the action, you correct that and come back. When you overstep the line, nobody says you are cheating. You say, okay, come back behind the line. And here we are saying, come back within 15 degrees [of elbow flexion] and play the game,” Dravid had said. The other side comes from Bishen Singh Bedi. A left-arm spinner of great repute, he has been a long-time campaigner against chucking. In a 2002 interview to Sambit Bal of Cricinfo, Bedi said: “It poses a far more serious threat to cricket than betting and bribing. I have seen young kids in Delhi trying to do what Murali does, and I have tried to stop them. But they respond by saying, “Woh bhi to kar raha hai, so why are we being stopped?” It’s not a healthy trend. But the onus is not on Murali or Sri Lanka. It’s upto the ICC to put a stop to this nonsense.” That was 2002. This is 2014. But Bedi’s views on the matter remain unchanged. Chucking is cheating. Nothing more, nothing less. The third side to the argument is whether the bowler was doing it with full recognition or whether it is an accident. We have seen bowlers wear full sleeves to prevent the umpires or fans from seeing the bent elbows, they also do it sparingly – not every ball is a chuck… sometimes it is just the quicker one, sometimes it is just after getting hit, sometimes they just want to bowl the doosra. So perhaps the question Dravid should really be asking is whether Narine knew he was chucking; whether he did it knowingly and whether he was comfortable breaking the rules. If the answer to any of those questions is a yes, then cricket is in trouble. We can’t expect any bowler to come out and say that he was knowingly abusing the laws of the game but by dealing in degrees, the ICC has ensured that there is a huge grey area. Under the old rules, International Cricket Council regulations permitted slow bowlers to straighten their arms from a bent position by five degrees. Medium-pace bowlers were allowed to straighten their arms by seven-and-a-half degrees and fast bowlers by 10 degrees. After the rule change in 2004, all bowlers are allowed to straighten their arms by up to 15 degrees. The ICC’s new rules were brought into force to allow greater “tolerance” of players who bend their arms when bowling. Sadly, tolerance has now taken on the form of abuse.