Former Test umpire Darrell Hair believes that timid officiating has allowed a generation of chuckers to flourish in international cricket and the current crackdown on bowlers with illegal actions has arrived 20 years too late.
Pakistani's ace off-spinner Saeed Ajmal is the highest profile of a string of spinners who have been suspended by the International Cricket Council (ICC) recently for bending their elbows beyond the 15 degrees allowed while bowling the ball.
The forthright Hair famously called Sri Lankan off-spinning great Muttiah Muralitharan for the offence during a Test at Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1995 and said that the ICC should have taken action back then, The Dawn reported.
Hair said that whatever the officials are doing now, they are doing it 20 years too late. He added that they had a chance in 1995 to clean things up and it's taken them 19 years to finally come back and say that they want chuckers out of the game.
Hair also said that he cannot believe that Ajmal has been able to bowl as long as he has, and they say that he is bending his arm by 45 degrees or something. He added that every man and his dog would have known that.
Hair said that he supposes what it does show is the general weakness of the umpires over time to do anything about it.
Muralitharan, whose action was later cleared by the ICC after biomechanical analysis, went on to become the leading Test wicket taker of all time despite also being called for throwing by Hair's compatriot Ross Emerson in Adelaide in 1999.
Hair also said that it would be interesting to see how many umpires are brave enough to get involved in it, adding that he had said it in the late '90s that if something wasn't done about it one would have a generation of chuckers on their hands and now they have.
