Of Bowlers and Chuckers

Now if there ever was a list of bowlers with weird actions, Paul Adams of South Africa must top the list and take the lead in a big way. Frog in the Blender, they called him.. Bamboozled the lot of them when he first came in, with just his action alone. He had a problem, though, he was no good....

The 2nd weirdest Bowling Action Must go to Muralitharan. Now there has never been a bowler whose action has been studied as much as Murali's and time and time again, it's been proven that there was nothing wrong with his action. Now people will say that the 15° rule came because of him, but this will be a bogus claim, due to the reason described in the next paragraph

During the champions trophy in England (the one which the West Indies won in dramatic fashion), many bowlers' actions were studied, and they found out that the amount of elbow flex was way above the allowed limits for most bowlers. (as I remember, Glenn McGrath was also found out to be one of them). It was inferred that the Naked Eye could only detect degrees of flex more than 15° (this was the result of the study done, not my theory).

Now as for Lasith Malinga, could someone show me a clip of someone (one of you, or someone you know, not Lasith Malinga himself) actually "throwing" (straightening the elbow at time of release) a ball with a round arm action at say 150 km/h and hitting a wicket 22 yards away on the half volley (by this I mean yorker length) and doing so more than once consecutively? I assure you, I tried, and my elbow almost broke. It still hurts. I don't think Lasith Malinga would be playing Test Cricket if he "threw" the ball.

I don't have a speed gun to measure how fast the throws were. An interesting observation was that my aim when I tried Bowling (as opposed to Throwing) was much better.

The problem with most of the skeptics is that they have never played enough softball cricket. That bowling action (at that accuracy) must have terrorised a lot of kids when Lasith Malinga was younger. It's certainly terrorising adult cricketers now.