Cricketers today are expected to abuse each other. Commentators call it ‘a bit of chat’, or ‘passing the time of day’ or some similar euphemism. I call it bad manners. But I am an old-fashioned thing.
Nevertheless in the innocent days when I played a lot of cricket there was one brutal accusation that a cricketer would sometimes level at another. If true it was devastating. If false it was the worst form of slander. It consisted of a single word. That word was ‘chucker’.
Good men bowled with a straight arm. Chuckers with a bent one. To chuck was to cheat. You would never appoint a chucker as club treasurer.
CB Fry was a remarkable man. He played both cricket and football for England. He held the world long jump record (having carefully laid down his cigar before running up to jump). He was the best ballroom dancer of his age. He was offered the throne of Albania. And in a county cricket match he was once called for chucking.
The next time he encountered the same umpire he immediately put himself onto bowl. When he was again called for chucking, he rolled up his sleeve to reveal a rigid box-like contraption that prevented him bending his elbow. The charge of chucking, as far Fry was concerned, was a stain on his honour.
The fastest bowlers have always achieved speeds of about 90 mph. So have baseball pitchers. But the pitchers do it without a run-up because they are allowed to chuck. Chucking helps.
Fast bowlers who chuck every ball are obvious. They are also few. The dangerous ones chuck only their yorkers and their bouncers. Charlie Griffiths, the West Indian, did that. The surprise brained a few batsmen.
For anatomical reasons that I don’t understand leg-spinners never chuck. But off-spinners do. It’s a great advantage to bend the elbow when bowling an off-break. And it seems that chucking the off-break is like taking up smoking. Once you’ve got the habit it’s hard to stop. There have been several off-break chuckers who’ve tried to remodel their actions. Few have succeeded.
But then came Murali, the Sri Lankan whom I cannot spell. Murali was like no cricketer seen before. He couldn’t bat, he couldn’t field, he had sunken piratical eyes and when he bowled he chucked it. It was the first thing you noticed about him.
But how wonderfully he chucked it. On Sri Lankan pitches in particular he made the ball loop and bite and fizz both ways and he made test-match batsmen look like fools.
At the time Sri Lanka was a fledgling cricketing nation. Murali’s wickets enabled them to compete with the
best. This was deemed to be good for the game. So the authorities changed the rules. They allowed bowlers to flex their elbows up to 15 degrees. The decision had nothing to do with cricket. It was part politics, part money.
Now half the world’s off-spinners chuck. Those that bowl the doosra, the off-spinner’s equivalent of the googly, all chuck. They have to unless they’re double jointed. The chucking rule has swung the pendulum a little back in the bowler’s favour. But at the expense of a black and white simplicity.
And I for one would still not vote for a chucker as treasurer.