Bishan Singh Bedi, arguably the greatest classical slow-left-arm spinner cricket has ever produced, has described the controversial bowling action of Sri Lankan offspinner Muttiah Muralitharan as "grossly unfair to cricket" and has demanded that ICC take strong and decisive action to root out chuckers from cricket. Bedi took 266 wickets in his 79-Test career, during which he captained India 22 times. In an exclusive interview in the February 2002 issue of Wisden Asia Cricket (due on news-stands in India tomorrow), Bedi refuses to compare Muralitharan with Australian legspinner Shane Warne, saying that Muralitharan should "start bowling first".

"If Murali doesn't chuck," Bedi says, "then show me how to bowl."

Bedi continues: "I have nothing against him personally, but it's grossly unfair to the game. Tell me, how can you call it bowling? He has no follow-through and he makes no use of his shoulders. And with an open-chested action like that, you can't possibly be round-arm. Murali's arm doesn't go up at all. It goes from the shoulder level. I have a picture of him bowling somewhere: he looks like a good javelin thrower."

Bedi is convinced that Murali's action is primarily responsible for the huge turn he manages to obtain off the pitch. "He doesn't even land it on the seam, yet he gets huge deviation off the track. Normally, you bowl with your shoulder, the shoulder follows the ball and, in the follow-through, the body follows the shoulder. Cricket is a side-on game. Batting, bowling, fielding … everything is side-on. How can you extract so much spin without any follow-through? After releasing the ball, he [Muralitharan] just stops.

"He does have a very good line and a beautiful loop," Bedi adds. "His trajectory is very fast and the ball dips very sharply which makes it very difficult to hit him out of the attack."

Bedi says that he has raised the matter of chucking in vain with his former team-mate, Srinivas Venkataraghavan, a great offspinner in his own right and now a respected international umpire. But Bedi laments: "Umpires are afraid; they want to secure their own jobs."

Muralitharan isn't Bedi's sole target. He questions the legality of the away-going ball bowled by most contemporary offspinners, including Harbhajan Singh of India and Pakistan's Saqlain Mushtaq. Bedi believes modern bowlers use techniques that are a lot different from the way Erapalli Prasanna, Venkataraghavan, Lance Gibbs, Ashley Mallett and Fred Titmus bowled this away-going ball.

"It was bowled using the shoulder, like an outswinger," Bedi points out. "Now they do it with their elbows and wrists. And they do it at a good 90-95 kilometres an hour – whereas an arm-ball or a floater is at the same speed as the normal ball. It [the modern away-going ball] is an illegitimate ball."

Bedi rubbishes arguments which claim that the actions of bowlers like Muralitharan and Shoaib Akhtar should be excused because they are born with defective arms. "Ian Meckiff was born with a defect, but he had to quit ... It's just too bad, honestly. Some people are born blind, or without limbs. Will a blind man be allowed to fly an aircraft? So why should a bowler be allowed to chuck because he has a defective arm? What does not conform to law is illegal; and the law has to be applied uniformly. The problem is that the parent body is not taking cognisance of the problem. It may soon become monstrous – every team may end up with three or four chuckers."

Bedi implores ICC to wake up to a problem which he felt posed a far more serious threat to cricket than betting and bribing did. "I have seen young kids in Delhi trying to do what Murali does, and I have tried to stop them. But they respond by saying, 'Murali is bowling similarly, so why are we being stopped?' It's not a healthy trend. But the onus is not on Murali or Sri Lanka. It's up to the ICC to put a stop to this nonsense."

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd