Chucking shame reduces hard men to tears as ICC admit to ‘clamping down’ on crooked arms

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

GRANT Flower is no-one’s idea of a soft touch. He would punish himself for playing a poor stroke by running back to the Zimbabwe team’s hotel instead of taking the bus. His fingers are gnarled like tree roots from being broken “23 times”, he likes to say, while taking catches.

But, on September 16, 2000, in the middle of Queens Sports Club’s gracious, tree-lined oval, Flower sobbed tears of shame.

Three times in the eighth over of New Zealand’s second innings, which Flower bowled, the umpire at square leg, Darrell Hair, held out an arm horizontally. Flower had been called for throwing.

For decades, he had chucked his left-arm spin in the nets as a matter of course. But this was different. Hair had branded him a cheat. For a man as deeply steeped in cricket as Flower, it was too much.

Flower played 24 more tests and bowled in 19 of them, but the moment when he became a chucker - and his reaction to that awfulness - sticks in many memories.

It will be cold comfort to Flower that he is the 11th and last player to have been charged, tried and convicted by an umpire on the field in a test. The first was Australia’s Ernie Jones in 1998.

Among South Africans, it happened to Geoff Griffin and it would have happened to Cuan McCarthy had Plum Warner, the godfather of English cricket, not warded off the umpires with, “These people are our visitors.”

The most notable entry is Muttiah Muralitharan, who was called in 1995, 1996 and 1999 - seven times by Hair in the Boxing Day test at Melbourne in 1995-96.

Donald Bradman took a dim view, calling Hair’s display the “worst example of umpiring that I witnessed, and against everything the game stands for. Clearly, ‘Murali’ does not throw the ball.”

But Bradman’s endorsement was not enough to spare Muralitharan, test cricket’s greatest wicket-taker with 800 victims, from years of abuse and suspicion, four rounds of testing, a study conducted by the University of South Australia, and bowling with his arm in a steel brace for the education of his critics.

In February, 2006, Muralitharan’s average elbow flexation when he bowled his doosra was measured conclusively at 12.2 degrees. For his off-break, it was 12.9 degrees. A year earlier, the International Cricket Council (ICC), stirred into action by Saqlain Mushtaq’s discovery of the doosra - the finger spinner’s wrong’un - in the 1980s, decided that bowlers would be permitted 15 degrees of separation from the straight and narrow.

The reasoning, scientifically proven, was that umpires cannot reliably spot the kink with their naked eyes until a bowler’s arm bends 15 degrees or more. But that has not stopped players from being “reported for a suspected illegal bowling action”.

The latest is Zimbabwe off-spinner Prosper Utseya, who had his name added to the dishonour role on August 22 and has 21 days from that date to be tested. Saeed Ajmal, the Pakistani off-spinner who is the ninth-ranked test bowler, has suffered the same fate.

In fact, the ICC seems to be on something of a vendetta against off-spinners deemed to be dodgy. West Indian Shane Shillingford was banned in 2010, cleared the next year and banned again last year. Also in 2013, Marlon Samuels was barred from sending down his faster delivery for the Windies. His off-break remains legal, however. This July, Sri Lankan off-spinner Sachithra Senanayake was outlawed.

Was cricket seeing more bowlers bending the laws of the game too far, or were the ICC newly determined to stop bowlers from walking a crooked line to success?

“I don’t think it’s accurate to say there are more illegal bowling actions, but the ICC are certainly clamping down and working hard in that area,” an ICC spokesperson said.

It’s enough to make some hard men cry.