Mohammad Hafeez the latest of the accused: Will off-spin survive this cleansing act?

So, Mohammad Hafeez has been the latest name to be scorched by the glare of sudden scrutiny. He has been spotted by the eagle eyes of the umpires who seem to be zeroing in on every bowler who runs in and tweaks them clockwise with his fingers. He joins Prenelan Subrayen and Adnan Rasool as off-spinners hauled up for suspect action during the current Champions League T20 tournament.

The trio became the newest additions to the growing list of bowlers who have been reported for actions that do not seem kosher. Of course, according to the rules, these bookings do not affect their international engagements, but just puts an embargo during the current tournament and the subsequent ones organised by BCCI. But, with Shane Shillingford and Marlon Samuels in 2013, followed by Sachintra Senanayake, Kane Williamson and Saeed Ajmal in 2014, it does seem that off-spin bowling is one of the most perilous occupations in cricket today. 

Additionally there are reports that as many as 29 bowlers have been reported in the Pakistani domestic circuit and 16 of them have already been banned. Details are not clear, but the general conjecture among cricketers - if tweets are anything to go by -  is that the unfortunate group must consist of off-break bowlers and their left-arm counterparts. All these do hint at a massive witch-hunt in progress.

However, such focused crackdown on a massive scale is not new in cricket. Parallels can be drawn with several other instances, such as the concentrated effort to remove the scourge of throwing in the last decade of the 19th century.

At that time it was understandable. Three forms of bowling existed, underarm lobs, roundarm and the relatively recently legalised overarm. With novel changes, there were experimental actions which bordered on the murky zone. Offenders had been aplenty, both in the English game and in Australia. Even the Test scene had been encroached by men of suspect action - the likes of Ernie Jones, Tom McKibbin, Arthur Mold and others. Lord Harris, the English cricket supremo, recruited the services of wandering umpire Jim Phillips as the hired gun to shoot down the evil of throwing.

Phillips, who called Jones and McKibbin in Australia, came over to England, and proceeded to call Mold 18 times during a match between Lancashire and Somerset, effectively ending the fast bowler's productive career. The bold umpire also called CB Fry three times in 1898, and once again in 1900 - and the versatile sportsman had to 'throw' bowling out of his huge repertoire of talents. Later Jack Saunders was omitted from the Australian touring side in the apprehension that Phillips would call him for throwing.

The other such phase in the history of the game was encountered in the 1950s and early 1960s. South African fast bowler Cuan McCarthy was not called during Test matches only because umpire Frank Chester did not want to create an issue. And during the 1958-59 Ashes series in Australia, there were at least six bowlers of extremely dubious action -  the principal offenders being Tony Lock, Ian Meckiff, Jim Burke and Peter Loader. Added to that, there was young Geoff Griffin of South Africa. After a heated conference of MCC involving Don Bradman and Gubby Allen, Meckiff was literally 'chucked out' of cricket. Griffin never recovered after being called - evidently on the instructions of MCC - and his career was over at the age of 23. Lock had to remodel his action to continue his playing days.

Thus we can see from the different chapters in the history of the game that such cleansing has been necessitated on occasion - when various circumstances resulted in the bending of the elbow and the straightening of the arm to a degree beyond the range of the blind eye. 

The current scourge has been obviously brought into the game with the advent of the doosra, the ball that leaves the hand of the off-spinner and turns the other way. It was a much needed innovation of the 1990s, a time when boundaries were getting shorter. With the turn of the century, as the bats fast became superbats, consisting of all middle and no edge, the doosra was the only way for the off-spinner to survive without the offerings fast disappearing into the distance beyond the near boundaries.

However, the concept of the doosra is such that results can be obtained only by cocking the wrist so that the back of the hand faces the batsman when the ball is released. It makes it well-nigh impossible for the ball to reach the other end with decent amount of spin, speed and accuracy if the final motion is not propelled by a jerk achieved by the straightening of the arm from a bent elbow. In other words, there is hardly any way to bowl it legally, even under the modified law, unless born with a deformity like Muttiah Muralitharan. Thus, as the art of off-spin got more varied and versatile, the actions got sketchier and the sleeves longer.

The crackdown is perhaps both justified and essential to maintain sanctity of the game. In some ways, the problem has gone on for long and already the action may come across as delayed. 

Yet at the back of the mind of the keen cricket follower, one doubt keeps rising its disturbing head. Will off-spin bowling ever recover from this cleansing act? Will the men plying this trade find out new means to overcome the challenges of bowling in the modern era after leaving out this devious weapon in their arsenal?

Or will this ancient art in the game of cricket relapse into a coma, in the wait of a messiah to breathe new life into the tricks and trade of orthodox spin.

Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He writes about the history and the romance of the game, punctuated often by opinions about modern day cricket, while his post-graduate degree in statistics peeps through in occasional analytical pieces. The author of three novels, he can be followed on Twitter at @senantix.