Bowling expert expresses sympathy for banned Ajmal
FOSTER INSISTS 15 DEGREES RULE WASN’T BROUGHT IN FOR MURALI
Daryl Foster, a bowling coach and renowned biomechanics expert at the University of Western Australia, has sympathy for banned Pakistan bowler Saeed Ajmal.
Foster was involved in testing Sri Lankan Muttiah Muralitharan’s bowling action in 1995, 1999 and 2004 and also in analysing Pakistani Shoaib Akhtar’s bowling.
Ajmal is missing from the ongoing World Cup because of a suspect bowling action and Foster said: “I have tremendous sympathy for any bowler that’s called for chucking.
“He carried Pakistan in all forms of cricket, not just oneday cricket, for four or five years. I feel he must have developed bad habits over a period of time. I think Twenty20 cricket has contributed a little bit to this.”
Foster, who coached Western Australia to nine Sheffield Shield wins in two stints between 1975 and 1995, is now 76 years old but is a reservoir of knowledge on the art of bowling.
On how he corrected bowlers like Akhtar and Murali, he said: “Akhtar, after he was tested, was found to be legal because of the enormous hyperextension that he had. So we said ‘OK, do you want to come with us’ because he was virtually there [positioning his arm to the level of shoulder] when he let the ball go.
“So we said ‘if you can get a bit higher, you are not going to be over the top, you are going to get a little bit more lift or whatever. And we think you will be a better bowler’.
Two-day job
“I said to [former Australia fast bowler Dennis] Lillee ‘how long do you reckon we will take him to effect those changes?’. Lillee said it would take six months but I said two days. And it only took two days, and the reason was because Shoaib didn’t begin bowling faster until he was 18 or 19 years of age. So it wasn’t ingrained in him.
“If you learn to bowl the wrong way, then it becomes a heck of a problem to change it when you’re 17 or 18.”
The laws of cricket allow bowlers to straighten their arm by 15 degrees when delivering, but anything more than that is deemed illegal.
Foster, who helped found the MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai in 1987 with Lillee and was also involved with the Lillee Fast Bowling Academy in Perth, explained how that came into effect.
“This was done at an ICC meeting in Dubai way back. Professor Bruce Elliott and Mark Portus were also at that meeting. I was there on behalf of Sri Lanka, representing them in terms of Murali,” he said.
“We were shown a film and testing results of iconic bowlers all over the world and they were all 7, 8, 10 degrees. So, all of a sudden, they had to come to some sort of compromise.
“There has always been a misnomer in the press that the 15 degrees was brought in for Murali. It’s silly. Fifteen degrees was brought in because at that meeting in Dubai at that time, the majority of the world’s bowlers fitted in under that 15 degrees.
“There was a certain percentage that didn’t and these are being picked up now, but I think 15 is better than what they had initially. So 15 is a reasonable standard to be able to maintain.”