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.

Hi Zainub !! Hope you passed your exams with flying colours and I'll be thinking of you when Pak play Eng(Smiley)but enough small talk; bent arms belong in Baseball, a great Sport no doubt but one in which the Pitcher plays every 5 days. Cricket has its Rules, some are stupid, no doubt(penalizing a fielder for hitting the stumps) and some are basic(bent arm not allowed during delivery-chucking is cheating). Change the stupid rules and leave the basic ones alone.

Hi Feroz! Thanks for the message, my results aren't out yet, but thanks for the best wishes all the same.

Would you want to elaborate why you think chucking is cheating? That's what I intended to ask in the post. If you can convince me if its really cheating then fair enough, we'll leave the rules as they are.

Who says chucking is cheating? Bowling a no ball is not cheating by the bowler, as the bowler does not know when he is stepping over the line. But if the umpire fails to call it (and there is some intent behind it) then it is the umpire who cheats the batsman.

It is also like a burglar breaking into a house with a alarm system in place. The burglar is only doing his duty and not betraying anyone - after all the system was in place in his anticipation - but if the security people do not act on the burglary immdtly and stop it then they are certainly cheating on someone.

Zai I appreciate the straightforwardness of the point you make, it is far better than the ICC's two-faced approach. But we need to be really out of our minds to back this.

At college we had a friend who was never allowed in the department matches but was extremely penetrative and always bowled at the stumps in our evening friendlies. He ran up to the crease and chucked.

For all the leeway made for batsmen, theirs is still a one ball game. As Feroz said, that is the basic part and you risk the dreaded unknown when you tamper with that.

On second thoughts, tell a batsman that all retrictions placed on the bowler (that you complain about, including bent arm bowling) will be removed from this day if they want that each dismissal will only be a minus four instead of a walk back to the pavilion. I do not see a single batsman complain of chucking, believe me.

Controversies like chucking have existed in this great game for a very long time. However, in the past people kept things simple and most of the times correctly got on with the game rather than whine about possible anamolies. ICC for one, surely does not help the game with its stance on this issue. The whole 15 degree idea in it self is inexplicably vague and ridiculous. Yet since all the so called protectors of pace and swing do not have a radical solution of their own it will be more sensible to just carry on with the game and allow yet another form of tecnology to take care of the trouble. If biomecahanists can judge with consistency the bends in the arm and detect illusion creating hyper extensions, then so be it. After all West Indies themselves would benefit from it as they also suffer from the menace of chucking at the domestic level. I would rather that Roberts and Holding concentrate on their own boys then the rest of the world!

Zainub, in reply to your question, chucking allows the bowler to bowl faster than he would be able to if he had to bowl with a straight arm. Please refer to Bradman's "The Art of Cricket" on this matter.
Also, I opened the Bowling for my teams from the age of 16 to 32. And I was never called for Chucking.

Hi Zainub,

You are kind of walking a slippery slope when you raise the question of how unfair is chucking. Why not, for instance, make no-balls legal therby allowing a bowler to run all the way up to the batting crease and hurl the stumps down. Would be preposterous, since it changes the entire game. Cricket has always been about 'bowling'. If you can tolerate slightly bent elbows, then what is the extent to which you are willing to go. Will we be allowing pitching at 100+ mph from 22 yards? You have to set an arbitrary level of tolerance and stick to it. Once you allow slightly bent actions, there will be people off the tolerance level by a slight margin, and then there will be a case to advocate a legalization of their actions. You have to keep the fundamentals intact. Bats are getting heavier, but no one in their right mind would legalize fibre reinforced composites or bats made out of piezoelectrics for that matter. Allowing bowling with a bent arm is a similar issue. The 15 degree rule has been stipulated from a policing perspective. That is the tolerance level that can be policed using the naked eye. What must be impressed, is that the effect of few small changes, like heavier bats and shorter boundaries, is bounded. Plus 35 to the average score. Allowing bowlers to chuck, fundamentaly changes the way the game is played. The entire science of bowling is rendered obselete, because it was geared to optimize performance under a specific set of constraints. Change the set of constraints and all the optimizations wither away...and what's more...cricket will be worse off for it.

Well apparently almost everyone has chucked to a certain extent, so I think there has to be some leeway. I'm sure it can't be easy to bowl quick with 0 degrees flex, so should we witness the end of fast bowling for straight arms? Even that might not do the trick.

Just give the 15 degree rule some time and it will become more acceptable. Cricket has often been reluctant to accept change. However, it never successfully resisted change and has continued to evolve.

Regulations are there to level out the playing field. Why is a cricket pitch 22 yards long and not 25? Justin Langer almost died 2 months back because he got hit on the head - a 25 yard pitch, a no-bouncer rule or an "at-most-10-step-run-up" regulation would have saved him the scare. But some time back in the past we decided that the length of the pitch should be 22 yards, it is quite arbitrary if you think of it. Soon enough, this 15 degree rule will become acceptable just like the pitch length or the number of deliveries in an over has, and cricket will move on.