After 200 years of the evolution of our great game, chucking has moved from being cricket's Achilles heel to being a nasty cancer that threatens to wipe out the essence of the sport.
Throwing the ball instead of bowling it is a cricketing crime. In baseball, you can throw, as in javelin, but in cricket it is written into the fabric of the game's core - to bowl with a straight arm, and that's why throwing or chucking must be punished. To not bowl the ball is not cricket.
Yet we have heard in recent times that for the last 200 years we have all got it wrong. We have heard from authorities, who have the assistance of the latest technology, that everyone, with the very occasional exception, has been throwing the ball with a bent arm all along.
The infamous survey, done in 2004, during a sanctioned ICC limited-overs tournament, announced that only one cricketer, Ramnaresh Sarwan, bowled the ball properly, that he alone did not straighten his arm when bowling a given ball. Every other cricketer targeted in that tournament was deemed to have thrown the ball and straightened his arm to some extent.
According to the findings, all bowlers broke the laws of the game as we knew them then. If we are to use that as the standard, then everyone, with the exception of the odd Sarwan, going back to when cricket began, was a dirty thrower too, including me. With these astonishing findings, thousands of bowlers were assumed to be breaking the rules, and yet no one knew it. Until 2004. Until one Sarwan showed them all up. I was wrong all along. It was Sarwan's fault.
