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Loading ...It is time that administrators listened to practisioners like Donald and Hadlee. This will eliminate the hysteria that accompanied reprimands to Atherton and Tendulkar. Many in the airconditioned offices in Dubai have never got their hands dirty and their morality is based on political expediency.
The future of fast bowling: ball tampering
By Will last year, at the end of July Add your comment below
Outstanding sniffing from our man Nagraj Gollapudi, a journalist who would probably still think he has a chance of getting a quote or two out of Michael Jackson.
Allan Donald suggests that the future of fast bowling lies in their hands. Or nails. Or anything else they can lay their hands on. I’m all for it; face it, ball-tampering goes on, and has gone on, since cricket began. The odd lift here and there, an occasional scrubbing, perhaps a few boiled sweets in your pockets: it happens. Would it be so disastrous if it was legalised? Donald presents a fascinating case.
To get reverse swing, one must rough one side of the ball while polishing the other. “One [popular] way to do it is to get the ball into the dirt,” Donald said, a method easily practised on rough subcontinent surfaces where the ball, especially the white one, soon gets scuffed up. “Even the red ball, in places like India, we found, did not take too long to reverse.”
England also used reverse swing to win back the Ashes at home in 2005. “Yes, I remember [Andrew] Flintoff and [Simon] Jones do it beautifully to swing it both ways especially in Old Trafford by chucking the ball into the foothold.”
Donald isn’t the first fast bowler to make this case; in the mid-1990s, Sir Richard Hadlee had also asked for ball-tampering to be legalised. “As long as the bowlers or fielders use whatever means they have on their persons, I don’t see anything wrong with it. I’m talking about the use of a finger nail to scratch the ball, not bottle tops or those sorts of things,” Hadlee wrote in a newspaper column at the time.
Tags: allan-donald, ball-tampering, fast-bowling |
3 Responses to “The future of fast bowling: ball tampering”
July 25th, 2009 at 10.53 pm
July 27th, 2009 at 8.15 am
Fast bowler is the heart of cricket. Cricket is a game of beauty and gentle . We dont want to see ball tampering
August 1st, 2009 at 6.51 am
When I was coached at Alf Gover’s indoor school at Wandsworth all those tears and years ago -Arthur Wellard,with hands like buckets could swerve(you may prefer swing)the ball either way by some two feet over the length of the pitch,indoors and on concrete….off three paces!!!
Whilst practising with the Kent junior professionals in the early fifties we all knew how to produce swing both ways and could do it – -what’s all the fuss about?
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