Cricket: Saeed Ajmal banned for chucking

[bldysabba]

@Amateur_Barbarian

And I so thought I was beginning to understand cricket.

“Chucking”?

I’m reporting the thread to be merged. Amateur barbarian - the other thread has a detailed explanation Cricket - illegal bowling actions - The Game Room - Straight Dope Message Board. Specifically, I’ll quote Cumbrian’s excellent post

@Cumbrian

I’m not totally familiar with all the vagaries of the balk rule, so I’ll try and describe this as best as possible and you will likely be the best judge.

In cricket, the bowler has to bowl the ball at the batsman using a “straight” arm. The inverted commas are very deliberate. It used to be the case that this was rigid but biomechanics have revealed that it’s virtually impossible to have a straight arm and bowl a cricket ball, as everyone has a degree of flexion in their arm during the act of bowling. Nowadays, a bowler is allowed 15 degrees worth of flexion off the straight when bowling. Anything more constitutes throwing or “chucking”. Throwing is frowned upon as it allows you to be able to do things with the ball that tilt the game too far in the bowler’s favour (for one, a pace bowler will probably be capable of greater pace and spin bowlers would be able to impart more and different spin on the ball).

The penalty for chucking in a match is a no-ball - i.e. the batsman can’t ordinarily be out as a result of that delivery (there are vagaries I won’t go into as they’re unimportant here) and the delivery has to be bowled again. Being continually no-balled for chucking leads to a warning from the umpire with a line of punishment leading to that player being excluded from bowling again in the game. Players with suspect actions are reported to the body running world cricket and have their action assessed independently in a testing arena (this is why the OP is suspect of the procedure, they’re not being tested in match conditions but effectively in a lab that won’t replicate match conditions). If passed, they return to cricket. If not, they have to modify their action and resubmit to testing of their action before they can.

Apologies to all for the undoubted inaccuracies in this - I’m dashing it off quickly as I have to go - there are doubtless things I have missed or slightly mis-explained but the general thrust of this should be accurate.