Cricket needs to rethink its view of throwing. Not that breaches of the Laws of Cricket should be allowed, but the stigma that is attached to players who have a suspect bowling action is often over the top.
Matt Kuhnemann is going in for testing because he has a suspect action. Not because he’s a deliberate cheat.
The way he bowls has been developed since he first started as a junior player on the Gold Coast.
Have you ever tried to coach a young cricketer on how to bowl? They will come up with their idiosyncratic action and the best you can do is suggest ways to make it better.
A bowling action is like handwriting – once it’s ingrained in someone’s psyche, it’s very hard to alter it to any great degree.
It’s remarkable when you look across the decades of bowlers across many countries in international cricket that there are very few who have had identical actions.
Kuhnemann has come up with his action over the years. It works for him and as long as he gets the green light from the ITC sports scientists, he has the potential to be a more than reliable option not just on turning tracks overseas but in the thankless task of trying to extract spin and wickets from the seam friendly Australian pitches
The Queensland-born Tasmanian left-arm spinner, who was reported by the ICC after his starring role in Australia’s recent 2-0 Test victory over Sri Lanka, has been withdrawn from the Sheffield Shield clash on Tuesday due to the thumb injury he carried into the Warne-Muralitharan Trophy series.
He will undergo the full gamut of biomechanical testing at an undisclosed date in the next week to determine if he does bend his left arm at more than the 15% limit allowed by the ICC.
Former Australian left-arm spinner Steve O’Keefe hit the nail on the head last week when news broke of Kuhnemann being reported when he said Cricket Australia should have been on the front foot a long time ago to test out his action.
“He would have trained in front of coaches who would have seen his development over the years,” O’Keefe said on SEN Radio, adding they should have been “proactive and say, ‘Let’s have a look at this, get him cleared at the Centre of Excellence up in Brisbane’, instead of being reactive”.
If any bowler, spin, seam or swing, makes the grade in the state ranks, who has any semblance of a suspect action, they should be tested there and then to avoid a repeat of the treatment being dished out to Kuhnemann right now.
Investigations into bowling actions often coincide with a player finding success at international level – if they are not a threat with the ball in hand then no one seems to care if the rest of their arm is not straight until they start taking wickets. Kuhnemann was the leading wicket-taker in the two-match series with 16 at an average of 17.18.
Former South African all-rounder Johan Botha pointed out that Kuhnemann will find it hard to shed the reputation for having a dodgy action.
Botha went through the process himself during his playing career because the off-spinner bowled with a bent-arm action, like Kuhnemann, which led some people to think that he flexed his elbow joint more than permissible.
Jason Gillespie was another former international bowler on the weekend who almost automatically said the chucker stigma would dog Kuhnemann irrespective of the outcome from his testing.
It’s highly unlikely that any bowler ever sets out to throw the ball deliberately.
Muttiah Muralitharan was infamously no-balled by Australian umpire Darrell Hair in the mid-1990s because he thought the prolific spinner bent his arm as he flung the ball towards the batter with his wrists also creating the impression that he was more baseballer than cricketer.
Thankfully, these days, on-field umpires don’t have to carry the burden of making such a momentous call themselves during a match and the biomechanics gurus, aka the experts in these matters, will study a bowler’s action to determine whether it passes the threshold.
Muralitharan managed to eventually get the nod from the sports science brigade, which dulled the murmuring, somewhat, surrounding his action for the latter part of his career.
But chucking is one of those peculiarities in cricket which armchair experts will never bend on no matter how much you try to twist their arm about the science behind a bowling action’s legality.
Former Australian spinner Ashley Mallett was a noted spin doctor and he went to his grave convinced that Murali was a chucker and wrote as much in one of his final cricket books, Great Australian Cricket Stories, which was published in 2017, four years before his death.
Muttiah Muralitharan is one of the greatest spinners in cricket history. (Photo by Rebecca Naden – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)
“When I first set eyes on Murali, I was certain that he threw, not just the doosra but every single ball. And throughout his career I haven’t wavered from that belief. In my opinion, sports scientists shouldn’t be allowed within a bull’s roar of a cricket ground.”
He went on to write that 5% should be the benchmark for the degrees of flex in an action and that the ICC “turned a blind political eye” to relax the percentage to accommodate Murali.
The concern for Kuhnemann and the Australians is that Kuhnemann has cemented himself as the heir apparent to Nathan Lyon as Australia’s next long-term frontline spinner, leapfrogging Todd Murphy not just from his efforts in Sri Lanka recently but also on the 2023 tour of India.
Watching Kuhnemann, it is clear that left arm is bent as he moves into his bowling motion and depending on whether you think it is an optical illusion or an actual throwing motion, his arm does seem to flex as it rolls over.
It’s hard for anyone to say definitively whether his technique remains in the boundaries of what is acceptable or not. Ergo, the testing he must now undertake.
If he does not get the green light, it is not the end of his career as it was back in the early 1960s when Australian left-arm seamer Ian Meckiff was thrown out of Test cricket after being repeatedly no-balled.
But if he needs to remodel his action, will he still be able to get the same amount of purchase on the ball and revolutions through the air?
It could threaten his professional livelihood so it is understandable that such a momentous decision needs to be scrutinised to the nth degree before a call can be made one way or the other.
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