 Chucking is bad enough but beamers are vile!
After Sehwag and Dhoni, not to mention Dravid and Laxman toyed with Pakistani pace, the likes of Mohammad Sami and Shoaib Akhtar looked rather ludicrous when they tried to unsettle Dravid and Sehwag with some crude aggro. The Indian skipper for one chose to ignore their taunts with disdain, while Sehwag often waved the offending pacemen imperiously away.
Before the series, the headlines screamed ‘Beware of Shoaib, he has this deadly new slower one that rang the death knell for England’s Ashes conquering batsmen’. ‘Pakistan are favourites at this time of the year’, warned the pundits; ‘The ball will dart around and the wickets will be fast and bouncy’.
Danish Kaneria was a potent new threat, according to some others, and he would prove a handful for the Indians. Commentator after commentator pontificated that genuine pace could work wonders where seam and swing might struggle. “Shoaib’s explosive pace will be the difference between the two teams,” they confidently predicted. And what happened? Shoaib, unfortunately, has at the time of writing, taken exactly one wicket in the series at a cost of nearly 200 runs. The wickets have been sleeping beauties and the Indian batsmen have made merry, undaunted by the hype surrounding Shoaib and Co., and the huge totals Pakistan have posted.
The ICC’s new ruling on chucking has made it easy for Shoaib, whose action is now legally above board, thanks to what Pakistani critic Osman Samiuddin calls an inherent kink in his body as in the case of Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan. Samiuddin wants to know why Shabbir Ahmed, another Pakistani quick now banished for a year for the third time by ICC for chucking, should be penalized for not suffering from such an inherent kink in his body.
Shoaib Akhtar can offer no such explanation for his tendency to let loose beamers at innocent batsmen. Ask Ian Bell of England, Jacques Kallis of South Africa or Ramesh Powar and now Mahindra Dhoni of India how it feels to have a bean ball directed at them. The answer can be no different from that of one of Brett Lee’s victims. At least the Australian has apologised every time he has come close to decapitating a batsman. According to New Zealand coach John Bracewell, “It’s very hard to pick Brett Lee’s bouncer. It’s even harder to pick his beamer. It’s the fourth time this season (after Lee nearly guillotined Brendon McCullum) that he has beamed one of our guys, and he’s been apologetic every time he has done it. That’s a lot of apologies.” Akhtar apparently has no such qualms. After hitting Ian Bell with a beamer, he went down to the crease and calmly inspected the damage, not showing the slightest remorse.
The Pakistanis claim the ball sometimes slips out of Shoaib’s hand and the media laps it up, conveniently forgetting the earlier occasions the ball slipped out of Akhtar’s hand, just as it did out of Waqar Younis’ during the 2003 World Cup, whizzing past Andrew
Symonds’ head.
Under the present law, what we used to call chucking is legal. Firing head high full tosses is legitimate too, so long as you can imply to the world the ball slipped out of your hand. If dubious bowling actions are allowed to flourish and dangerous offences such as the bowling of head high full tosses at velocities approaching 150 kph are overlooked, cricket will undergo a transformation in its fundamental nature. It will no longer be the spectator sport that generations of lovers of the game have enjoyed watching. It will became a gladiatorial contest bereft of finesse or beauty. It won’t be cricket any more.
Beamers, intentional or otherwise, have no place in the game. Bowlers should be mercilessly outlawed if they indulge in that vile practice.
V Ramnarayan
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