But seriously, had the Board been alive to this issue earlier, India could have had some umpires on the elite panel and this in turn motivates other umpires to do well and that in turn improves the standard of umpiring at the domestic level and so on… Former players Maninder Singh and Yashpal Sharma (now national selector) both tried their hand at domestic umpiring sometime ago, without the Board encouraging them at all and slowly they gave it up altogether. Both were good, very confident umpires (I saw them umpiring) but the Board kept giving them under-19 games and they got frustrated and chucked it all away. If they had been encouraged (like S Venkataraghvan was) I’m quite sure, both would have been on ICC’s elite panel of umpires today.. Anyways, the Board has now realised its mistake and has become quite serious about improving the standard of domestic umpires and trying to get them up into the elite panel.
At the end of the day’s play, I spoke at length to these three umpires (both the on-field ones and the umpires’ coach) about this new trend of no-balling the chuckers in domestic cricket. They were unanimous about one thing – the manner in which the off-spinners bowl their doosra these days, they simple cannot do it in a legitimate way. According to them, all doosras are illegal deliveries. You simply have to bend the rules to bowl that ball.
So if Sarandeep bowls a doosra in domestic cricket, it’s called an illegal delivery. But if Murali and Bhajji bowl the same thing in Test cricket, it’s a legal ball.
“Well the ICC is not calling bowlers on the field in international cricket. But as far as we are concerned, even those (the doosras bowled by Bhajji and Murali) are illegal deliveries,” said one of the umpires.
Which brings us to another interesting point – when we have the likes of Erapalli Prasanna, why do these offies not go to him for advise. As is well known, Prasanna could bowl a terrific leg-cutter in the same action and it deviated more than the present doosra. More importantly, Prasanna’s leg-cutter was a perfectly legitimate delivery. While most of the doosras (whether bowled in domestic or international cricket) are not.
