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Mukul Kesavan looks at why the ICCs present system of variable tolerance limits based on bowlers speeds is untenable and unenforceable and suggests an alternative. This piece appeared as the cover story in the June issue of Wisden Asia Cricket.For those of you who thought that the laws of cricket require bowlers to bowl, not throw, you should know that the ICC allows all bowlers to chuck, i.e. to straighten their arms at the point of delivery. But not all ICC-sanctioned chuckers are created equal. In a sign of the growing clout of India in international cricket, bowlers have been classified into a kind of Hindu hierarchy, a caste system where status is based on the sacred principle of speed. Thus, a fast bowler can straighten his arm through 10 degrees (that is, crook his arm and chuck from that angle), a medium-pacer through 7.5 degrees (dont you love the specious exactness of that decimal point?) and a slow bowler, or spinner, is allowed the smallest cheat of all, a mere 5 degrees.According to Wisden Cricinfo, Tolerance levels were recently introduced by the ICC - although not into the Laws of Cricket - because research into fast bowling indicated that some degree of elbow straightening was identified in 99% of cases. The natural elbow flexion spanned from 3 to 20 degrees. What this means in plain language is that the immutable laws of cricket carry on being immutable, but the men in charge of implementing them are instructed to ignore bowlers who chuck within some theoretical limits. How might an umpire measure the degree of crookedness on the pitch, short of peering through a protractor? And how, therefore, are the tolerance limits to be enforced? Recent events have supplied us with a possible answer.After Chris Broad reported Muttiah Muralitharan to the ICC because he thought his doosra was dodgy (or dodgier than his other deliveries), Murali was wired and measured by boffins in Australia. The subsequent report tells us that Murali seems to flex his arm through 14 degrees while bowling the doosra, which is nearly three times the chucking allowance for a spinner. After corrective coaching, according to extracts from the reports published in The Hindu, the degree of flexion was brought down to 10 degrees, still twice the permitted limit of tolerance for spinners. Despite this, the report recommends that he be allowed to bowl the doosra pending further investigations and research. Which leaves matters as clear as mud.The ICC has decided to ignore the scientists recommendations. It has banned the doosra and put Murali on notice by making it clear that if he is called for bowling the doosra again he could be banned from international cricket for up to 12 months. These current levels of tolerance are based on expert advice that suggests that, beyond a certain level, bowlers will gain an unfair advantage, Malcolm Speed, the ICCs chief executive, said in a statement, explaining the ICCs position.Bizarrely, the expert, Bruce Elliott, who was approved by the ICC to do the tests on Muralis doosra, has, according to Wisden Cricinfo, strongly criticised the current tolerance limits, which he claims are based on illogical data! Wisden Cricinfo reports him saying that, ... the five-degrees [rule] is based on illogical data because theyve just tested fast bowlers and assumed that there is some relationship between fast bowlers and spin bowlers. Fifteen degrees is the right angle to select for fast bowlers and you probably should come down to 10 degrees for spin bowlers.Another member of the team that worked with Murali, Daryl Foster of the University of Western Australias School of Human Movement and Exercise Science, also questions the rationale behind the discriminatory tolerance limits in his report on Muralis action. On what information, studies or research, he asks, are the ICC tolerance figures of 10 degrees, 7.5 degrees and 5 degrees for bowlers ranging from fast to spin, based? Without knowing what the situation is with other spin bowlers, he says, it would seem unrealistic to ban Muralis doosra without the benefit of proper research having been undertaken into normal spin bowlers. Im not sure where that leaves Mr Speed or the ICC. Paddle-less, I think.This is a pivotal moment in the history of cricket and it is important that no one, neither Murali nor anyone else, be punished or proceeded against till the ICC rethinks its `tolerance limits because in their present form they are inconsistent, discriminatory and unenforceable.They are inconsistent with the basic object of the law against throwing. The law against straightening the arm at the point of delivery is meant to discourage the unfair advantage in speed, bounce and turn that such flexion gives a cheating bowler over his honest, straight-armed contemporary. So if bending and straightening their arms allows Brett Lee or Shoaib Akhtar to bowl faster, given the laws of cricket, the ICC should instruct them to bowl with straighter arms, even if this means they bowl less rapidly. Instead the ICC has taken the view that the faster you bowl, the more flagrantly you can chuck. Why should an honest, straight-armed trier like Javagal Srinath end a career with poorer stats than, say, Shoaib Akhtar, simply because he took crickets laws seriously?The workhorse medium-pacer is only allowed a 7.5% ceiling of crookedness: did the ICC stop to think that the reason hes bowling slower is because his action conforms more closely to the definition of a legitimate delivery? And conversely, did they consider the possibility that the reason why Brett Lee and Akhtar terrorise batsmen with pace and bounce is that their bowling actions depart more radically from the prescriptions of the Laws of Cricket? Cricket cannot discriminate between fast bowlers and slower ones without standing the letter and spirit of its own law on its head.I have thought for some time now that the bounce Glenn McGrath extracts from just short of a good length owes something to a straightening arm and I was delighted to find support for this view in a recent article by Simon Hughes in The Daily Telegraph. Heres the quote: [Courtney] Walsh was never called for chucking and neither was Glenn McGrath. Yet McGrath gets some of his pace from a hyperextension of the elbow which varies in extent [emphasis added]. Shoaib Akhtar is a similar case. In fact most fast bowlers flex their elbow slightly at some point in delivery. I would go so far as to say virtually all of them inadvertently throw the odd ball. If Law 24.3 was applied ultra-rigorously, there would not be many fast bowlers still playing.Oddly enough, McGrath is regarded as the exemplary fast bowler, Akhtar and Lee are hailed for injecting excitement into the modern game, while the wretched Muralitharan is reviled around the world by Australian umpires, Indian spinners (retired), Michael Parkinson, and now Chris Broad. Why?In the recent past, crickets administrators and commentators have developed a conservationist policy towards fast bowling. I remember hearing the otherwise sensible Ian Chappell say during Indias last tour but one of Australia that he hoped umpires werent too severe on the likes of Lee and Akhtar because they brought so much to the game. Almost as if the ICC had been listening, this view has been enshrined in these absurd tolerance limits. In an earlier time men like Charlie Griffith and Ian Meckiff had their careers ruthlessly cut short once they were called. The reason for the difference between then and now is straightforward: before the introduction of the helmet, fast bowlers who chucked were life-threatening; now, pace Chappell, we are free to see them as a source of cricketing sex-appeal and excitement.But even if we were to go along with this decadent, later-Roman point of view, we need to be consistent. Murali brings as much to the cricketing table as McGrath or Akhtar or Lee. He is the most destructive spinner in the history of cricket, bar no-one, not even Warne. He turns the ball a yard into the batsman, then turns it away at will with his doosra, the most amazing delivery since Bosanquet invented the googly. What perverse logic allows Akhtar to bend his arm through 10 degrees and stay legal while the same degree of flexion in the case of Murali brings him to the attention of Broads beady eye?Murali can either be embraced as part of a general redefinition of the legal delivery, or, if the ICC chooses to enforce Law 24.3 strictly, he can be excommunicated along with the epidemic of crooked-arm artists who have taken over the contemporary game. What the ICC cant do, is to make Murali pull over while allowing Lee and Akhtar the run of the fast lane.Instead of making Murali the lightning rod for the controversy over chucking, why not test all contemporary bowlers who represent their countries in Tests or one-dayers and publish the degree to which they straighten their arms? Should such a study reveal that the likes of Lee and Akhtar and Harbhajan Singh are chronic arm-straighteners, there will be enough boards with a dog in the fight for the ICC to have a robust debate about the tolerance limits as they are presently framed. Cricket will avoid the spectacle of one bowler being hounded on account of his success and we might actually get a principled discussion on what is an epidemic of illegality.If indeed most fast bowlers chuck, and if the ICC doesnt want to rigorously enforce its own laws because this might render them extinct and make crickets theme park less attractive, then the only durable solution is to change Law 24.3 for all bowlers, not just express chuckers. The laws of cricket dont (and shouldnt) lay down that speed is more significant in the matter of defining a legal delivery than swing or bounce or spin. The law seeks to lay down a general and universal rule for a legitimate delivery. If the ICC now feels that 10-degree flexion is permissible within this definition, then this should apply to all bowlers so that all of them, slow, medium and fast can exploit the possibilities of chucking equally. Daryl Foster who worked with Murali to reduce the illegal flexion he used while bowling the doosra, suggests exactly this in his remediation report:It may be that 15 degrees of extension be allowed to all types of bowlers no matter what speed they bowl at, beyond which it will be termed an illegal delivery.The working assumption behind the graded tolerance limits seems to be that the arm straightening that occurs within those limits is involuntary, and that because of the biomechanics of bowling fast, the sins of fast bowlers are more involuntary than those of others. This is a dangerous assumption because it takes us into the murky terrain of intention (did the bowler mean to chuck?) and the uncertain authority of a fledgling science.In his replies to a series of questions put to him on the rationale behind the tolerance limits, David Richardson, speaking on behalf of the ICC, says repeatedly that the tolerance limits had been put into place not to accommodate fast bowlers who straightened their arms, but to acknowledge the biomechanical realities of bowling fast. The levels of tolerance are set so as to accommodate a degree of straightening which might occur due to the stresses placed on the body during the delivery. Even a solid metal bar, if rotated fast enough will display a degree of movement. The metal bar analogy is meant to be the scientific clincher: if natural laws of motion can bend rigid, inanimate materials, the living tissue that makes up the human arm must be susceptible to them.The problem is, metal bars dont often have elbow joints. All other things being equal, all metal bars will flex to exactly the same degree when rotated at a given speed. The same isnt true of human arms. Here, the degree of flexion will depend on individual arms: some will be doublejointed, some thick and muscular, others thin and sinewy: by definition, other things cannot be equal. The ICCs own evidence indicates that even among fast bowlers who havent been called or reported for unfair actions, some flex their arms through nine degrees and others not at all. If theres even one fast bowler who doesnt flex his arm, arm-straightening, arguably, becomes a choice, not the inevitable result of a scientific law. So why not make the zero-degree men the norm? Why be permissive and offer the latitude of 10 degrees?Good question, replies Richardson, but you have to draw the line somewhere. The bottomline is that in the case of fast bowlers, anything under 10 would not be noticeable to the naked eye.Really? Brett Lee and Shoaib Akhtar have both been reported for dodgy actions earlier in their careers and cleared. They have been bowling fast with impunity for a while. Does this mean that they currently flex their arms less than 10 degrees? If they do, then Richardsons claim that sub-10-degree flexion is invisible cant be right because the kink in their actions is clearly visible to the naked eye - to nearly every spectator who has ever watched them bowl. And if they do flex their arms more than 10 degrees, why havent they been reported again? Have they been tested since the tolerance limits came into effect? If the ICC is already in the business of commissioning scientific studies to frame bowling guidelines, theres no reason for them to wait till an international bowler is reported.Science isnt going to provide self-evident answers. The research shows that some fast bowlers can bowl without flexion while others straighten their arms. Science doesnt speak with one voice in the matter of spinners either. According to Richardson, the ICCs study showed that the stress or forces on the body of the spinner were not sufficient to warrant any degree of straightening. Diametrically opposed to this finding is the expert opinion of Daryl Foster as reported in The Hindu:We contend that because the speed of his (Muralitharans) upper-arm rotation is as fast, and in some cases quicker than, fast bowlers, his level of acceptability for elbow extension should also be set at the 10-degree mark.The ICC needs to understand that it cant apply to science for warrants to enforce discriminatory laws. The laws of cricket, like other human laws, cant lay claim to the ultimate truth; but they must aspire to fairness. Good laws have two prime qualities: they are uniform and they are enforceable. ICCs tolerance limits meet neither criterion.In India, for historical reasons, Muslims are governed by a separate personal law which, among other things, allows Muslim men to marry upto four women concurrently. Indians of other communities - Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and so on - are legally monogamous. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of Muslim Personal Law, it has created in Indian politics endless controversy and grievance, real and imagined.For cricket to create the equivalent of a Muslim personal law for fast bowlers - Im allowed 10 degrees to your five - when the traditions of the game dont mandate such differentiation, is mad. Fortunately the law itself hasnt yet been changed, the statutes of our game dont formally recognise this sectarian distinction, and there is time for the ICC to take on board some heartfelt Indian advice: dont go there.If the ICC intends to abide by the letter and spirit of the original law, there is an alternative course. The council should declare that it is willing to bend the law fractionally to accommodate research that shows that large numbers of bowlers find it difficult to bowl without straightening their arms. It should nominate a three-, fouror five-degree limit, a single-digit figure that is derived from the low end of research findings. Notice that the sentence doesnt read bowl fast without straightening, but simply, bowl without straightening.The ICC should demand that every bowler come in at or under this minimum deviation from the straight-arm norm. It should make it clear that as the apex body of the game its main concern is with making all bowlers conform to the law rather than with stretching the law to fit some bowlers. Any fast bowlers who find it impossible to bowl at 98 mph without exceeding the three-degree cutoff will be welcome to decelerate till their bowling arcs fit the ICC template. Any spinners whose doosras (or for that matter, their pehlas) require a suspension of disbelief greater than three degrees (or four, or five, so long as the limit is low and general to all bowling species) will be sentenced to long hours in solitary watching videos of Bishen Bedi in his delivery stride from every angle that the archives can supply.If the scientists are to be believed, many bowlers wont make the cut, but the integrity of cricket was never going to come cheap. Should the ICC not have the stomach for the uproar that will follow, it can go the more permissive route and peg the tolerance limit at 10 degrees for everyone. It will change bowling as we know it by encouraging the Lees, Akhtars, Harbhajans and Muralitharans at the expense of more orthodox bowlers, but it might give cricket a chance to find a new equilibrium. What wont work are discriminatory tolerance limits - that way lies endless bickering and litigation. Different strokes for different folks is a plausible motto for a commune but a bad prescription for cricket.Mukul Kesavan is an essayist and novelistClick here for highlights of the latest issue of Wisden Asia Cricket. To subscribe to the magazine, Click here.CC Sabathia Yankees Jersey . It was the second consecutive win for the Pacers (2-5), who lost their first five preseason games. Jeff Teague led the Hawks (1-5) with 17 points and eight assists and Al Horford had 12 points and seven rebounds. Mike Scott scored 15 of his 17 points in the second half. Gio Urshela Jersey . 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The match started slowly for Ivanovic, who surrendered her first two serves as Hantuchova took a 5-3 lead.Former Bellator middleweight champion Alexander Shlemenko (53-9, 1 NC) makes his return to the promotion after 20 months away when he takes on Kendall Grove (23-15, 1 NC) in Fridays main event of Bellator 162 (Spike TV/ESPN Deportes, 9 p.m. ET).After Shlemenkos most recent win with the promotion in February 2015, a highlight-reel KO of Melvin Manhoef that was later changed to a no contest, the California State Athletic Commission suspended the 32-year-old Russian for three years and fined him by $10,000 for testing positive for anabolic steroids.He filed a lawsuit against the CSAC last fall, and the suspension was eventually lifted and fine cut in half in July via a California Superior Court decision. ESPN.com spoke with Storm about the ruling, the return bout with Grove, his student-teacher relationship with Bellator welterweight champion Andrey Koreshkov and whom hed prefer to fight between Chael Sonnen and Rory MacDonald.In the statement you issued after your suspension was lifted, you maintained your innocence regarding the drug test after the Manhoef fight. Do you plan to continue battling the no-contest, or are you just moving on with your career?I think it is hopeless. It is hopeless to fight the commission, so no. I decided this situation is behind me. And I have much better things to do. I think and I know that my win against Manhoef was 100 percent clear and honest victory.During the suspension, you were able to fight twice in your home country of Russia. What was that experience like for you?I am very glad the commission and Bellator gave me this opportunity, gave me permission to fight in Russia. During this period of time, when I couldnt compete in the U.S., I was able to stay active. It was a good test for me, because both times I fought Vyacheslav Vasilevsky, whos a very tough fighter, a good fighter, and the fact that I beat him, it brings joy to me.Its been a while since the American market has seen you in action. Do you feel you need to make a statement against Grove? Yes. Definitely I need to make a statement. Specially that during that period of time that I wasnt able to fight in the States, I put up a great amount of work in the gym. I changed all the things in my preparation, in my fighting style. I want to test it myself and want to show it to the public. I want to show it to the fans.Grove will have a sizable height and reach advantage in this bout. Without giving away your game plan, do you feel comfortable that youll be able to find your range to strike with him?To be frank with you, Ive never fought anybody who is as tall as Kendall, but I have a feeling that everything will work out really well for me.When you aand your team scout him on tape, what strengths and weaknesses do you see that you can plan to exploit?It is really difficult to speak about his weak side because his strong side is obvious, his ground game and his boxing.dddddddddddd Hes a really well rounded guy, but I think that I will be able to find his weaknesses.Since your last fight with Bellator, a new middleweight champion has been crowned in Rafael Carvalho. What are your thoughts on the division, is it tougher than it was when you first went away?Its difficult to evaluate the division right now. What I can say, I think that Carvalho lost that fight to Manhoef and I think that Melvin is supposed to be the champion right now.In your last fight in America, you delivered that highlight-reel knockout to Manhoef. With a victory over Grove, do you feel you should be in line for a title shot?I dont know, its up to Bellator actually. I can just tell you one thing, I want to fight often. I am ready to fight once every two months. It doesnt matter for me if its going to be a title fight or not because I know that I am going to beat them all.Bellator has made splashes in free agency by signing MacDonald and Sonnen. Would fights with either of them interest you in the future?I would rather fight Rory MacDonald rather than Chael because with Chael we trained together and I know him personally. Thats why I dont really want to fight him. Of course if Bellator put us against each other I would fight him, but its not something that I want to. But with Rory I would really want to fight against him.How long ago did you train with Sonnen?It was two or three years ago at Reign [Training Center] in California. It was just a few practices but we bonded.Your protégé Koreshkov has a title fight a few weeks after your bout. How much time have you spent with him to prepare for your own fight?We always train together because hes my student so I prepare myself for the fight and I also prepare him for this fight. He came with me as one of my corners so he continues his preparations here so I can watch him training and I can make sure I coach him.Do you get more out of winning a fight yourself or seeing your student do well inside the cage?Its way easier to prepare and fight yourself rather than prepare, coach, and see your student fight. In this connection, the joy is actually much higher when your student wins. I am more than just a coach to him, more than just a friend. I actually feel, I am like a father to him. Also when he fights, his wins bring me more pleasure than my own. ' ' '