Chucking - what do you reckon?

[injuryupdate]

Now that the law has been expanded to 15 degrees for chucking, which conveniently gets in Murali's doosra, which comes in at 14 degrees, how do you think the umpries and ICC should police chucking?

Personally I reckon only call blatant throwing and let everything else stand OK (including Murali). It is a tough one though.

[injuryupdate]

An advantage of having more leniency for chuckers might mean less back and shoulder injuries in bowlers (possibly more elbow injuries though).

[Danny]

I can't wait to see if we will finally get to see someone bowl over the 100 mile/hr mark now. It's about time bowlers got some good news, ever since batsman have been able to wear a piece of padding on every aspect of their body it just hasn't been the same. I really want to watch some batter's jumping out of their skins for once. Bring it on!

[Rod Whiteley]

Finally the ridiculous nature of this rule is being shown for what it is. How stupid that fast bowlers have been largely ignored in this issue, and yet (according to the 3D kinematic analyses at least) their arms straighten as much as Murali's from the time they get to shoulder height until delivery.
The most recent incarnation of this rule was just plain silly - if you are a 'spin' bowler then you can straighten by XX degrees, but if you are a 'fast' bowler, then you can straighten by YY degrees. So what about the fast bowler's slower ball that comes in at about 110kph? Does he become a medium pacer for that delivery?
This rule was just unworkable. My 2c worth is to legalise throwing -yup, the batters have had it too good for too long. Throughout the 1900s until about 1980 the average in test cricket was about 2 runs per over. These days the Australians are nudging 4 and a half or more - so where do you think the balance has shifted? Pitches are definitely better prepared in general, outfields are faster, and the playing equipment (especially protective gear) is much better.
Why legalise throwing?
1. It stops the 'he said she said' in slandering a bowler's name. No umpire can see with any accuracy if you're straightening by 14 degrees (and therefore legal) or 16 degrees, so being called for throwing will be on the basis of personal preference - or as we saw with one Australian umpire, a vendetta against a bowler whom he decided had a 'diabolical' action. Rugby had this problem with lifting in line-outs - it was an unpoliceable rule, so they removed it, the game changed but the field stayed even.
2. If you take a 'chucker' into your test side, you are taking in a bowler who is going to give you a maximum of 30 overs in 5 days. Major League baseballers pitch about 100 - 120 pitches maximum in an outing, and they mostly are on a 5 day rotation (one day on, four days off). In baseball you also get to warm-up before you come in, and in between innings as well. No such luxury in cricket. If you pick one of these guys in your 11, and he doesn't tear through the order, things are looking pretty skinny for the rest of the match.
3. The hardest recorded throw was by Nolan Ryan who threw at about 100 miles per hour - the same speed Jeff Thomson and Shoaib Akhtar have reached. There are currently a handful of guys who throw in the upper 90's, but none of them are the 'stand out bests' in terms of pitching wins. It's interesting to note that Thomson and Akhtar have no wicket taking/average records to speak of. There would be quite a few guys around who bowl faster than Glenn McGrath - who would be your first picked?
4. As someone who used to throw at cricket (a lot) my experience is that it raises no suspicion at all if you just throw about 1 every over or two. It rarely is the ball that takes the wicket anyway, it just keeps the batsman honest, and is therefore almost impossible to detect.
My final (provocative) piece of evidence is that one Australian fast bowler had an injury to his elbow which is the 'classic' thrower's injury (a rupture of the medial collateral ligament of his elbow) and yet the entire 'chucking' thing didn't seem to come up for him. Yet when a little bloke from a third world country is threatening to be unplayable, and has a 'different' action, you should hear the crowds bay for his blood. I wouldn't tour Australia either if I were him, and it's our loss.

[Danny]

Well said Rod!

With the new 15 degree limits applied the ICC have a 'hit list' of who they are after, but will they really stamp these players out of the game?
I doubt it very much. What do you reckon?


Seven on chucker's list
By Robert Craddock and Ben Dorries
November 17, 2004
FOX SPORTS

SEVERAL of cricket's most famous bowlers, but no Australians, are on a seven-man hit list that is the target of the game's new chucking laws.

The list of names – drawn up by the ICC's special sub-committee – will rock the cricket world.

It contains not only Muthiah Muralitharan, but also blue-chip bowlers such as his Sri Lankan teammate Chaminda Vaas, Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh and Pakistan superstar Shoaib Akhtar, who have taken more than 2000 international wickets between them.

West Indian Jermaine Lawson, Pakistan's Shoaib Malik and Bangladesh's Sanwar Hossain are also under intense scrutiny as cricket prepares to introduced a major overhaul of the way it polices suspect actions.

The actions of the seven bowlers stood out as being highly suspect in exhaustive slow-motion testing to finetune the new chucking guidelines.

But Aussies Glenn McGrath, Brett Lee and Jason Gillespie are in the clear, despite Muralidaran on Monday asserting new technology had revealed the trio were all breaking the rule by straightening their arms beyond the current limit of 10 degrees.

Relations between Muralitharan and the Australian cricket side have dipped to a frosty low.

Australian Cricketers' Association chief executive Tim May, who yesterday addressed the issue with the Australians in Brisbane as they prepared for tomorrow's Test against New Zealand, was clearly unimpressed with Muralidaran's claims.

"I sat on that sub-committee and I don't know where those figures come from," said May, who helped frame the proposed new laws after viewing extensive research.

May refused to comfirm the identity of any bowlers on the hit list.

Australian batsman Matthew Hayden said the fast bowlers were "a little bit disappointed" with Murali's comments.

"Sticks and stones in the paper is going to get Murali no favours among world cricket," Hayden said.

McGrath and Gillespie have applauded the proposed new law, which will enable all bowlers to flex their arm to 15 degrees.

"At first I thought the new rules were coming in for the sake of it and I was against it," McGrath said.

"Now that I've looked into what it entails, I'm now all for it. To have a method of testing which is pretty exact from high-speed cameras is the only way to do it," McGrath said.

"It can be a lot more exact. To me, it's set the standard. It takes out a lot more grey areas."

Shane Warne said the key to the new rules was having the players abide by them, but he hoped they did not dissuade umpires for no-balling a bowler if they felt his action was illegal.

"If they think some bloke has a dodgy action, I'd still call them," Warne said. "With so much furore made over certain bowlers who have been called over the years, the umpires hopefully aren't too scared to call anyone."

But former New Zealand captain Jeremy Coney feared cricket could become "hijacked by science" and said the game has made a "compromise call" by allowing bowlers to straighten their arms to 15 degrees.

"We are on the verge of legitimising what's been going on for the last few years," Coney said in Brisbane.

"I'm sorry that Murali has had a bent arm since birth, but we either take a stand now or find people pushing it more and more so that 20 or 22 degrees becomes the norm one day.

"You face a fast bowler with a bent-arm action. You can't see the ball. It will be plain dangerous."

The Courier-Mail

[injuryupdate]

Having a fixed bent arm (i.e. one that can't fully straighten) is almost certainly going to help a bowler. Murali is the most successful bowler (average wickets per test) of all time, and until he had an operation which corrected his fixed flexion problem, Brett Lee was the fastest measured of all time.

It makes sense because the wrist flexors have much greater purchase and are stronger when they contract with the elbow flexed compared to fully extended (this can be proven by grabbing something tightly with your hand with the elbow straight and then bent - the grip is much stronger with the elbow bent).

I agree that chuckers aren't going to take over the game. It will benefit spinners more than fast bowlers. You really couldn't hit a golf ball any faster and better with a run up (a la Happy Gilmore), just as you couldn't throw faster or better with a run up. Since then cricket pitch is a lot longer than the distance between batter and pitcher in baseball, it would be easy pickings if someone just stood there and threw at you as in baseball.

The best bowlers (and pitchers) in the world are the ones where the batsmen can't pick the different deliveries from the bowler's body action. If your body looks the same when you are bowling an inswinger versus an outswinger or a leg spinner versus a flipper or a fast ball versus a change up, then the batter is in trouble.

Bring on the pie chuckers and bastmen will still have it OK.

[Rod Whiteley]

Having a fixed bent arm (i.e. one that can't fully straighten) is almost certainly going to help a bowler. Murali is the most successful bowler (average wickets per test) of all time, and until he had an operation which corrected his fixed flexion problem, Brett Lee was the fastest measured of all time.
I'm not quite sure of the logic there, Murali remains n=1, and he does do something very strange - off breaking with a wrist spin. There are guys who can pick him, and he has been ineffective against these. He also has the advantage of being in a side with not much else in the way of bowlers. Similar to Richard Hadlee (who was also a great bowler with no one supporting him) somebody had to get the wickets. I didn't know Brett Lee had a correctional surgery, I thought he had torn his ulnar collateral ligament, supposedly in a 'freakish' accident.


It makes sense because the wrist flexors have much greater purchase and are stronger when they contract with the elbow flexed compared to fully extended (this can be proven by grabbing something tightly with your hand with the elbow straight and then bent - the grip is much stronger with the elbow bent).
Intuitively this would seem the case, but in practice, throwers all release the ball at about the same angle of elbow flexion. Note that the rules are happy with any elbow flexion angle, as long as it stays the same from the time you reach shoulder height until you release. Murali's the guy who's forced this rule change, but is will just take a submarine pitcher (who throws without his arm ever reaching shoulder height) to force another rule change. For an image of a submarine pitcher, look it up on google images, or I can post some footage if you like.
As for grip strength and throwing velocity, there's one paper I know of that correlates the two but only in adolescents. (Clements, A.S., K.A. Ginn, and E.C. Henley, Comparison of upper limb musculoskeletal function and throwing performance in adolescent baseball players and matched controls. Physical therapy in sport journal, 2001. 2(1): p. 4-14.) but quite a few on the timing of elbow extension as being critical in velocity generation (e.g. Matsuo, T., et al., Comparison of kinematic and temporal parameters between different pitch velocity groups. Journal of Applied Biomechanics, 2001. 17(1): p. 1-13.)

I agree that chuckers aren't going to take over the game. It will benefit spinners more than fast bowlers. You really couldn't hit a golf ball any faster and better with a run up (a la Happy Gilmore), just as you couldn't throw faster or better with a run up. Since then cricket pitch is a lot longer than the distance between batter and pitcher in baseball, it would be easy pickings if someone just stood there and threw at you as in baseball.
You do throw harder with a run-up, it's one of the reasons pitchers were given a mound to pitch off. (e.g. Fleisig, G., et al., Kinematic and kinetic comparison between baseball pitching and football passing. Journal of applied biomechancs, 1996. 12(2): p. 207-224.) Pitchers pitch from a rubber 60 and one half feet from the front of the plate, the catcher sits a distance back from this depending on where the hitter stands. Stump to stump in cricket is 22 yards, and the crease is 1 yard, so crease to crease is 20 yards, or 60 feet. Of course, pitchers stride from the rubber (to a distance of about 79% of their height) so they do throw a little shorter than bowlers, but this disadvantage could be outweighed by the improvement gained from the run-up (or not)


The best bowlers (and pitchers) in the world are the ones where the batsmen can't pick the different deliveries from the bowler's body action. If your body looks the same when you are bowling an inswinger versus an outswinger or a leg spinner versus a flipper or a fast ball versus a change up, then the batter is in trouble.

Bring on the pie chuckers and bastmen will still have it OK.
In the 70's with the advent of the 'slider' (a pitch that looked like a fastball, but was a little away-dipping braking ball) took about 50 points off the hitters' averages. The 'circle change' (a form of slower ball) did a simlar thing more recently. Curiously, cricketers haven't yet learnt that a great way to interrupt timing is to have the hand speed and the ball speed 'out of sync' which keeps the hitters off balance. One of the reasons Brett Lee's slower ball is ineffective is that it is too slow, and a the hitters seem to be able to adjust off his fastball.

Allowing bowlers to simply throw makes perfect sense, but this is cricket we're talking about here. When they let bowlers throw, I'll start eating cricket balls.

[injuryupdate]

Brett Lee had a stress fracture of the olecranon when he was very young, and he bowled with it non-united for many years. When he tore the medial ligament and was going to be off for months, he had surgery to fix the stress fracture, which increased his elbow range of motion.

It is pretty hard to know whether it was a direct effect, but since the surgery, even though his elbow is now technically more "normal" or anatomical, he doesn't have the same pace. Obviously he is still bloody fast but is now high 140s or at best low 150s rather than high 150s at top pace.

Murali has a far more serious fixed flexion deformity and just happens to be statistically the best off spinner of all time. This should be a pointer that the cricket laws on chucking have serious flaws. It is great to have a sport where a serious anatomical deformity can still allow you to be competitive. There is something wrong with the rules of the game if a serious anatomical deformity allows you to actually surpass everyone else, perhaps because of that deformity rather than despite it. No one will ever know what sort of a bowler Murali would be if he had full elbow movement, but my guess would be not quite as good as he is now.