Seven times on Boxing Day

Fifty-five thousand people were at the MCG for the first day of the 1995 Boxing Day Test. Australia batted, and would eventually make 500 for 6 declared.

Muttiah Muralitharan was twenty-three, on his first tour of Australia, and bowled thirty-eight overs in that innings.

Seven calls

Darrell Hair was standing at the bowler's end. He called Muralitharan for throwing seven times.

The position matters. An umpire who suspects a bowler of throwing has two places to judge it from, and the square-leg umpire has the side-on view that shows the arm. Hair called it from behind the bowler, which is the harder angle and the more public one, and which made the calls a statement rather than a technicality.

Steve Dunne was at square leg. He did not call him.

Muralitharan kept bowling. His figures for the innings were 38–7–124–1, which is a long day’s work by any measure and a very long one when the umpire at your end has decided your arm is illegal.

Sri Lanka had won the toss and put Australia in. David Boon then batted 312 balls for 110, Steve Waugh made 131 not out, and the innings lasted 165 overs. Arjuna Ranatunga took his side off the field at one point later in the same tour, over the same question, with a different umpire.

Full scorecard: Australia v Sri Lanka, 2nd Test, Melbourne, 26–30 December 1995 →

This time the card says so

Under Match Flow, first day: Muralitharan called for throwing by D Hair, 7 times.

That single line is worth pausing on. Thirty-two years earlier at Brisbane, Ian Meckiff's career had ended to the same offence and the scorecard recorded nothing at all. Not the calls, not the count, not the umpire. Here the count is preserved, which is why nobody argues about whether it was five or eight.

The record improved. It took three decades and it improved.

The match around it

Sri Lanka made 233 and followed on. Glenn McGrath took five for 40 and was named player of the match. Asanka Gurusinha made 143 in the second innings and Shane Warne took four for 71, and Australia knocked off 41 to win by ten wickets.

Nobody has ever needed to look any of that up. The Test is remembered for seven deliveries that were not deliveries, and the other 2,300 have gone.

The case for the umpire

An umpire who believes an action is illegal is required by the laws to call it. Waiting for a committee is not among the options available to him on the field. Hair has said since that cricket's crackdown on throwing came twenty years too late, and he has held that position consistently and at considerable cost to himself.

The case against

The calls came on the biggest stage in Australian cricket, from the bowler's end, against a young man on his first tour, in front of fifty-five thousand people, with no testing protocol available to settle it either way.

Dunne did not call him. Nor did most of the umpires who stood in Muralitharan's matches over the following fifteen years.

Later biomechanical testing found that almost every bowler in the game straightens the arm to some degree, that the human eye cannot reliably detect fifteen degrees of flexion at the speed a delivery is bowled, and that several bowlers with actions nobody had ever questioned exceeded the threshold being applied to Muralitharan. The tolerance in the laws was rewritten around those findings. The action Hair called in 1995 would be legal under the laws written afterwards.

What nobody had

There was no protocol, no agreed threshold, and no mechanism for an umpire to refer the question rather than answer it in front of a full house.

Two officials watched the same arm from twenty-two yards apart and reached opposite conclusions, and the sport had no way of establishing which of them was right. It built one afterwards, partly because of this. Muralitharan finished with 800 Test wickets.

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No. 2 in Not Out, a series of 2.

TomorrowDay three, no play