Come on, don't say you weren't expecting it. Clearly it's the new 'it' in the chucker's guide to escaping penalty.
Don't cry foul, soon all the off-spinners are going to be saying the same. Maybe Botha will bowl with an arm brace for an over in a match to prove his point. All in the name of cricket.
"Johan's arms aren't straight when they hang by his sides. They are naturally bent at the elbow. He has a natural deformity."
That's Vinnie Barnes, the South African bowling coach. Johan also tearfully told his tale of disability to Cricinfo:
"You have to bend your elbow to bowl it, but in my case it starts bent and stays that way."
And here's a little something to set your blood boiling. Us darn Aussies are really quite evil, we call just about any players from the subcontinent for chucking if we can't play them. Forget our own home-bred chuckers who we apparently don't out (despite having done so on many an occasion), the real reason we're such sick bastards who repeatedly make chucker claims against others if because we can't bowl it ourselves:
Bruce Elliott, the UWA professor who is also the ICC biomechanist, had made an interesting discovery in his dealings with finger spinners. "He said he had found that a lot of bowlers from the subcontinent could bowl the doosra legally, but not Caucasian bowlers," Barnes said.
Clearly this is the perfect fuel to add to the fire of the debate which is raging in many places about the supposed tendency of Aussie players to call chuckers. We're just so jealous of those bowlers, you see. Why should they get to bowl the doosra while we can't? You know what, how about we just report them? Sounds like a plan.
I hope the woeful bias and ludicrosity of the arguments that Aussies just call any off-spinner outside their country a chucker is blatant in that above paragraph. I'm not having a go at anyone, but it seems a wasted opportunity to not point out that those claims are ill-founded. Not only do we identify chuckers in Australia, often at an early age, but those who manage to make it to state level are denounced for their bowling action. It's really not a lie when we say that you just won't make it to the big time if you're a pie chucker in Australia.
And on the same note as the article referenced to above, a comment by Mark Boucher:
"There are other guys out there who bowl the doosra who should be sent for testing. Let's see how they shape up under the new regulations."
I guess they all have deformities too.
Not a chucker, just a poor deformed bastard.
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