bangalore what is so sacrosanct about the 15 degree limit for quirks in bowling action why limit it to 15 degrees therein lies a tale that might substantiate why so many bowlers have run into problems for chucking this edition of the champions league t20 has brought into focus the illegality of the bowling actions of sunil narine adnan rasool mohammed hafeez and prenelan subrayen and it is likely that many more international bowlers will soon be reported for a similar offense hafeez was called way back in 2005 after an odi against west indies but he like saeed ajmal and others got away with it for long before the icc was seized of the menace late last year shane shillingford and marlon samuels of the west indies sri lankas sachithra senanayake and new zealander kane williamson were pulled up at that time and gradually more bowlers have been put on the watch list the latest being sunil narine who was reported after the clt20 game on monday other bowlers who have had questions raised on their bowling action and are engaged in the ipl include kevon cooper keiron pollard johan botha harbhajan singh and muthiah muralitharan interestingly most of the bowlers mentioned above bowl with longsleeves probably to mask the excessive straightening of the arm so much so that when kings xi punjab captain george bailey chose to praise his young leftarm spinner akshar patel recently he pointedly remarked he contains he takes wickets and he does it with a shortsleeved shirt which is pleasing to understand the effect of chucking the logic of batting needs to be outlined when a bowler with a clean action operates the batsman expects and sees the ball coming out of an arc the bowling arm rolling over on delivery and reacts accordingly but when that arc is broken because of chucking the batsman momentarily loses sight of the ball that precious fraction of a second which eats into his reaction time gives an unfair advantage to the bowler irrespective of whether he is a spinner medium pacer or fast bowler and in t20 cricket this precious fraction of a second is absolutely critical probably bowlers feel that modern bats and explosive batsmanship have tilted the balance in the batsmens favour and that they need something extra to contain them in limited overs cricket and invariably it is the ones with the quirky action chuckers really who provide captains with that something extra in crunch situations over the years the mcc custodian of the laws of the game have tweaked the throwing law a number of times in the 2000 code they came up with a stipulation that slow bowlers could straighten their bowling arm by 5 degrees medium pacers by 75 degrees and fast bowlers by 10 degrees as tests proved that it was near impossible not to flex the elbow when the bowling arm was rotated at the shoulder then came the bolt from the blue the icc secretly filmed all