Donald calls for legalised cheating
Allan Donald would like to see ball tampering “preparing” legalised by the ICC. Proper fast bowlers are now an endangered species, so they should be allowed to do whatever they want with the ball to help level the playing field.
If I were interviewing Donald, I would be asking him how this would produce better bowlers. Because it won’t. It will give mediocre bowlers the chance to make themselves look better.
The problem at the moment for fast bowlers is the quality of the pitches, which by and large are now too good – flat and slow wickets will only encourage defensive bowling. Add this to the workload in the different formats of the game and you have a recipe for mediocrity.
A look around world cricket shows very few top-class pace bowlers, or even bowlers in general. Dale Steyn is by far the best paceman statistically. Mitchell Johnson and James Anderson are improving, but their figures still have room for improvement. Andrew Flintoff and Brett Lee on top form are superb, but we have seen precious little of either of late.
There are a small number of younger players emerging. Wayne Parnell and Mohammad Aamer are the latest, but there aren’t many others. It’s all a bit of a sorry tale.
Spin bowling isn’t much better. Murali is far and away the best, Ajantha Mendis has had a great start in international cricket and Shakib-al-Hasan shows great promise for Bangladesh. Not much else there either.
Forget legalised cheating, spice the pitches up a bit and watch the bowlers come to the fore again. Cricket will be more entertaining for it.
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