Degree of confidence

Mahendra Singh Dhoni, rather brusquely, summoned Ravindra Jadeja and ordered, "Bend your arm."

Jadeja thought it was a peculiar order, but he had never questioned his captain. He had long realised that if he started finding fault with whatever the skipper said and did, he would have to accept that there was something wrong with his own presence in the Indian team.

So, the Saurashtrian dutifully rolled up his sleeves, ran a few steps, lifted his left arm above his head and let go of an imaginary Duke ball.

"Oye, Under-19," Dhoni called out to Unmukt Chand, who was loitering around in the hope that the captain would see him, remember him as the captain of the Under-19 World Cup winning Indian team, and give him a contract for the Chennai Super Kings Under-20 squad. "Sir?" Chand replied, his hopes high, like Virendra Sehwag's had been just before the team for the England tour had been selected. "Get me a ruler," Dhoni commanded. "Sir?" the junior cricketer sounded less hopeful, more bemused now. "Idiot, who else but a student will have a ruler. You are still in school, aren't you?" A crestfallen Chand left and returned shortly with a protractor. He had guessed what the Indian captain was up to.

"Jaddu, bowl once again. And Under-19, measure what needs to be measured," said Dhoni, casually indicating that esoteric stuff like "15 degrees of permissible straightening of elbow joint" and decrees such as these didn't interest him as much as farming the strike in losing causes did. Jadeja obediently went back to his bowling mark and ran in. Chand held up the protractor, looking like a modern equivalent of the medieval mariner with a sextant, and tried to catch the deviation from the right angle that the bowler's arm was showing. The entire sequence was repeated six times, the last as a live enactment of slow-mo action. At the end of it all, Chand reported to Dhoni that all was well. He also wanted to tell him that this was not the way bowling illegalities were determined, but he still harboured hopes of making it to the CSK U-20 team and didn't want to antagonise Dhoni. The Indian captain looked pleased as punch when he heard the result. It meant he could continue to play Jadeja in India's matches.

"Boss, if my arm was off the 15 degrees, what would you have done?" a sweating Jadeja ventured. He looked a tad shaken, knowing a slight inclination of his radial bone in the wrong direction would have landed him in the same spot as Ajmal Saeed and out of the team, whatever the efforts of his captain to retain him.

"The Board had a plan. It always does," smiled the relieved Dhoni. Now that the catastrophe had passed, he might as well tell Jadeja about the remedial measures planned for a calamity by the Board. First, the bowler would have been subjected to intense biomechanical technology and the exact deviation from the permissible 15 degrees determined. Then the brightest minds from the IITs would have sat down and fabricated a titanium spring that would bend back to the precise angle identified by the earlier biomechanical process. The spring would have been inserted into the bowler's radial-ulnar region so that the elbow would bend so much and no further, thus guaranteeing the bowler would always be bowling a legitimate delivery. Such a spring-fed delivery would pass muster with the umpires, ICC hawks and Bishan Singh Bedi.

"And in spite of these, if things had failed," confided Dhoni, "the Board had an emergency plan. It would have taken over ICC and declared that no Indian would be subjected to the humiliating elbow test."

Free Run is a fortnightly look at alternate realities joel.rai@bsmail.in