Suspicions … Saeed Ajmal bowls against England.
ANDY FLOWER, England's team director, has refused to approve the legality of Saeed Ajmal's controversial bowling action after his side's 10-wicket loss to Pakistan.
Ajmal, who was named man of the match, took 10 wickets in the first Test including a bravura performance of 7-55 in England's first innings. Yet, when asked about the spinner's action, Flower failed to follow the lead shown by his captain, Andrew Strauss, who dismissed any suspicions surrounding it.
''I've got my own private views and talking about them here and now isn't going to help the situation,'' Flower said. ''Our job is to deal with whatever a bowler bowls against us and the International Cricket Council's job is to police the game.''
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Flower is a savvy coach and knows being called a ''chucker'' is about the most emotive term there is after ''match fixer'', but his reluctance to kill the controversy suggests the issue has been niggling him for a while. England were certainly unhappy with Ajmal's action in 2010, after he took five wickets against them at Edgbaston and five in the next Test at The Oval, which Pakistan won.
Their main concern was the doosra he bowled from around the wicket, a ball which seems impossible to deliver without flexing the arm more than the 15 degrees allowed under a law only recently relaxed.
The ICC has received no official complaint about Ajmal's action, from the match referee or the umpires. Billy Bowden, who stood in this Test, was the man who first reported Ajmal after a one-day international against Australia on April 24, 2009. Tested by the ICC's Panel of Human Movement at the University of Western Australia in Perth, Ajmal was cleared a month later. But, as the report made clear, there were caveats to him being allowed to continue bowling.
It also confirms that, along with all bowlers, ''the match officials will use the naked eye to determine whether Ajmal's action complies with the laws,'' noting that the permitted degree of elbow extension of 15 degrees is set at the point at which extension will become visible to the naked eye. ''Accordingly, any degree of extension which is visible to the naked eye must and will be reported.''
Commenting on the results at the time, the ICC general manager - cricket, David Richardson, said: ''Saeed Ajmal can continue to bowl in international cricket on the basis he uses an action consistent to that used in the latest independent analysis of his action. However, it is important to emphasise that no bowler is ever cleared, as it is impossible to predict how a player might deliver the ball in the future.''
Richardson is a former Test player and knows a bowler's action is only as clean as his last ball. The problem with the ICC's protocol is bowlers can ease back in the lab in a way they would not do in a match. To be meaningful, measurements have to be made in situ and that has only been attempted once, during the 2004 Champions Trophy.
While that kind of official analysis will not take place during this series, England's batsmen have to find ways of nullifying Ajmal before the second Test begins on Wednesday.
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