Pakistan spinner Saeed Ajmal was recently suspended by ICC as a result of their recent crackdown on suspected bowling actions. (Source: AP)

It could be better testing methods or, as I suspect, the expression of intent long dormant, that is behind the crackdown on bowling actions. It doesn’t really matter. Cricket is meant to be a straight arm game and there were far too many people turning a blind eye to it. Indeed, this year’s ICC World T20 was a carnival of bent arm bowling, people were pinging it from all angles and maybe that was the tipping point.

I was a bit puzzled by the fifteen degree rule when it was introduced. I could understand the logic behind it because testing showed that everyone flexed the arm to some extent and if that allowance wasn’t made, hardly anyone would be allowed to bowl. And tests showed too that anything under fifteen degrees wasn’t always apparent to the naked eye. It stood to reason then that anything that was clearly visible was greater than fifteen degrees, so in effect the ICC was strengthening the old way of doing things; if you can see it, it is wrong.

Now we learn that Saeed Ajmal was flexing his elbow to around forty degrees. And was getting away with it. That is like batting with a nine inch blade! So was it umpiring error that he wasn’t reported? Or was that just policy being implemented? Or did he go from fifteen degrees to forty when he was reported. It is important to know. But at least now we are up and running and hopefully will stay consistent.

I hear talk of real-time measurement and that is welcome as long as it doesn’t impede the flow of the game. We now have a swing meter for example that tells us how much a ball deviated in the air from its normal trajectory. We get that pretty quickly but matches don’t depend on it. More important, this real time measurement tool will have to be at all grounds. Currently the best technology in the game is available to the biggest budgets and that is an ongoing debate on the universality of DRS.

In a strange way though, the bent arm was doing for the spinner what the regulations were increasingly denying him. It was helping him achieve the balance between bat and ball, something the game has virtually given up on, certainly in the limited overs format where far too many believe, to the detriment of cricket, that it is all about big scores. Bats are now clubs, edges are almost bats by themselves, only four fielders are allowed outside the 30 yard circle, boundary ropes are coming in so close they look like they are strangling the playing area and there are two new balls. In effect we are telling the poor spinner to come up and face a firing squad everyday. (I know there is the counter-argument that pinging the ball with a bent arm is the easy way out and that the spinner must strive to put more on the ball but inevitably you will hear a batsman say that!)

If the spinners are still doing all right it is because they have to be cleverer than the batsmen; it is the old survivor’s instinct. It could also be that in the big-bat-big-slog era, the batsman’s skill against spin is diminishing. Irrespective of that, the game has now to address the issue of giving the spinner something.

For a start, maybe you need to look at the bats. Just as the width of the blade is specified, must we specify an upper limit for the thickness? Or, at the bare minimum, should we cast another look at the dimensions of a cricket ground? Should we make 80 metres the minimum distance from the bat in front and square of the wicket? Some of the grounds I have seen in recent times reminded me of those we played inter-school matches on! And remember, a lot of World Cup matches will be played in New Zealand where some of the grounds are tiny. Where does the spinner go?

And then there is the switch hit which makes a mockery of the bowler’s field placement. The spinner’s only real friend now is a dusty, cracked surface and you won’t see too many of those in limited overs cricket. So peculiarly, while the bent arm was a naughty friend, it was one of the few friends that the spinner had. But I’m afraid he had to go!