Dark, with lashings of Kolkata

Before the IPL there was the doosra. But allow me to take the scenic route to explain. Over a dozen years ago I sat in the verandah of the Cricket Club of India in Mumbai to interview Bishan Bedi for what would become the first Talking Cricket interview, easily our longest-running series. (It has now outlasted two print publications.)

Warm, opinionated and loquacious, Bedi, as you might expect, was delightful on the art, the mechanics and the psychology of spin bowling.

Then the conversation turned to spin bowlers. Shane Warne won praise, but Muttiah Muralitharan, his great rival, got a straight dismissal: "We are talking about bowling here."

This was before research stumbled upon the near-universal straightening of the elbow among bowlers, before the 15-degree tolerance was instituted, before Murali volunteered to subject himself to a trial, bowling wearing a brace, and before Bedi's ire against Murali became a cliché. I came back to the office with mixed feelings. I had sympathy for Murali, whom I liked, but also admiration for Bedi for saying it as he saw it.

Like the IPL, the doosra, which in its most common form cannot be bowled without chucking, has always split opinion. Some see it as a blot on cricket and its good name, an unscrupulous shortcut that bypasses honest toil and cherished values, and they won't countenance its existence.

Others believe cricket ought not to be precious and that it must recalibrate its canons to embrace the doosra, which has not only taken the game forward but also is mitigation against the ever-growing imbalance between the bat and the ball.

There are many who, like me, are ambivalent. They see the doosra, like reverse swing before it, as an evolutionary response from the offspinner, an endangered species, to neglect and injustice. But their sympathy is tempered by discomfort over the perils of vigilante justice, and its potential to alter the fundamentals of the sport.

Chucking is in the spotlight again, with the ICC, armed with new technology and a new resolve, turning the heat on illegal actions. In this issue's cover story, Osman Samiuddin, who has followed the arc of the doosra up close, tackles the subject by first stripping away the emotions that often blight any argument, and then using available scientific research to sift through the complexities at hand. Saeed Ajmal, the central figure of the article, is portrayed as neither villain nor victim but as a willing participant in a narrative with many shades of grey.

Some see the doosra as a blot on cricket, an unscrupulous shortcut that bypasses honest toil and cherished values, and they won't countenance its existence

There is, of course, no doubt about the colour of cricket's real scourge: match-fixing. For the large part, Mohammad Ashraful's career was a story about lack of fulfilment, but he painted it decidedly black when he bartered the game's integrity and his own for easy money. His redemption began with acknowledgement, and our Bangladesh correspondent Mohammad Isam was pleasantly surprised to gain an interview with Ashraful. Though it didn't turn out to be a mea culpa, Isam found a man willing to front up to his failings off and on the field.

Sadly, there is no one to accept blame for the events that sent Zimbabwe cricket spiralling into an abyss from which it is hard to see it emerging soon. Tristan Holme, a Zimbabwean who divides his time between that country and South Africa, retraces the events of the ten dark years since 2004, drawing a portrait of a cricket nation that has been reduced from the high of the 1999 World Cup, when the side made it to the Super Six, to having its cricketers survive from match to match.But not everything is dark and gloomy in this issue. In Talking Cricket (it's still running, in the Cricket Monthly now) we reunite VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid, giants of Indian batting and heroes of one of the greatest turnarounds in cricket history, to relive the two days at Eden Gardens in 2001 that changed the course of a Test series, and, it can be argued, laid the path for a golden age of Indian cricket.

There is also a celebration of the greatest acts of fielding by four fine writers; a quirky list of Indian cricketers who could have been Pakistani; a salute to Ian Botham's unflagging commitment to cancer research; and a delicious dollop of Viv worship that provides a lovely note to sign off on. If you are a cricket fan of a certain vintage, you'll instantly know what John Harms is getting all goosebumpy about. Else, just watch the walk here.

*An earlier version of this article had an incorrect caption for the lead photo.

Sambit Bal is editor-in-chief of ESPNcricinfo. @sambitbal

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