How a 50-year-old rule change is hurting Australia's pace bowlers
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A rule change dating back more than 50 years is contributing to the spate of injuries tearing through Australia's pace bowling stocks, according to one expert who is on a mission to change things.
Cricket expert Doug Ackerly spent nine years researching the no-ball rule and how it is umpired for his new book, Front Foot: The Law That Changed Cricket.
"For 200 years in cricket the criterion for a no-ball was the fact that your back foot had to land behind the bowling crease, which is where the stumps are planted," he told ABC News Breakfast.
"Once it landed clear of that you were home free; it didn't matter where your front foot landed."
However, that rule was changed in 1963 to instead put the emphasis on where the front foot landed, stating it couldn't go over the popping crease.
This, Ackerly argues, changed everything.
"What I found was that it shortened the delivery stride ... and a jump appeared in the gather, which is the preparation before the delivery stride for fast bowlers," he said.
"[Now you get] lumbar stress fractures and front foot stress fractures with five to eight times your body weight going through that front foot."
Australia's list of pace bowlers has been dogged by stress fractures in recent years, with James Pattinson, Mitchell Starc and Peter Siddle all suffering.
Rising star Pat Cummins made his return in the one-day international against New Zealand on Sunday after a stress fracture sidelined him for more than a year.
Many have blamed the run of injuries on the large workload modern players have, with commitments to Test, Shield and ODI games throughout the year.
Last month, retired fast bowler Mitchell Johnson said the workload was wearing players down.
"When you're playing Test matches, you're playing them back-to-back, and then you've got a one-day series two days later and then 20-20s and then you fly out, [and then] you're overseas playing back-to-back tours, it sort of all just flows into one thing," he told ABC News Breakfast.
'We don't bowl as much as we used to'
However, Ackerly said the data didn't support this line of thinking.
"Too much bowling? They have never bowled less in representative cricket," he said.
"[South Africa's] Morne Morkel took 240 test wickets [and] delivers about 2,300 balls a year.
"[England's] Alec Bedser, who is the former Test record holder delivered in his 15 years of top level cricket, an average of 7,400 a year."
Pace bowlers routinely delivered more than 5,000 balls a year from the '60s through to the '90s, according to Ackerly's research, but that has become a rarity in the last decade, with most averaging between 2,000-3,000.
Acklerly said that as evidence around stress fractures mounted, it could deter some parents from allowing their kids to play cricket.
"[The rule change] made the game unsafe," he said.
"If parents think that Little Johnny or Little Jill is going to have a stress fracture ... they are going to say, 'Look, this game is unsafe, we won't let Little Johnny play cricket'."
Ackerly has the backing of former Australian cricket captain Ian Chappell, who wrote in the forward to Front Foot that he hoped cricket officials would take the advice on board.
"If they read his comprehensive coverage of the controversial no-ball law and still believe the current situation is best for the game, then it'll only confirm that in cricket circles at least, the problem with common sense is it's not that common."
