Friday, February 8, 2002 Bishan's on a mission. The flightiest of bowlers could have been forgiven for his latest flight of fancy had it not been so tinged with bitterness, insult, and perhaps even envy. Age brings wisdom but it also bestows senility, piles, and a rose-tinted view of history. Sportsmen are particularly prone to succumbing to the latter of these ailments, with Fred Trueman's cricket-were-better-in-my-day-analysis being a prime example of this infuriating pomposity.

Fred and his fellow old farts should know that we have all seen the videos and television highlights and, however much you try to browbeat us, it was not better in them days. In fact, it was slower, easier, and more corpulent. Blame pit boots if you must but we simply do not know if the stars of Fred's day would have been any good today.

Still, Fred will have been delighted to hear Bishan Singh Bedi's recent attack on the modern game, and modern spin bowlers in particular. If you have not read the interview in Wisden Asia Cricket you should, it is a corker (click here to read). The original spinning sardar is unable to utter a kind word about Harbhajan, Saqlain, or Murali. Praise for Warne is tempered by an unflattering comparison with Stuart MacGill. Fred would be proud of the way Bishan trashes the new and sanctifies the old.

But, alas, he is wrong. Wrong to label Harbhajan and Saqlain as chuckers simply because they have mastered a delivery that Bedi never thought of — he dismisses the doosra, or ulta, as a throw. Mystifying. Twice as wrong to imply that spin bowlers in his day attacked and today's batch do not. For your information, Bishan, all the modern spinmasters are attacking bowlers. Wrong, three times over, to suggest that one-day cricket is anti spin bowling. One-day cricket has killed off precisely the kind of negative spin bowling that he accuses today's stars of. The spinners that flourish in the modern game are innovative, versatile, and attacking.

Ironically it is Bedi who diminishes his art. To him, the only spin bowlers worth their salt are those that buy their wickets — just like he did in fact. Throw enough up and the batsman will overindulge. It is precisely this suicidal strategy that spawned negative spin bowling, a defensive mindset that took hold in the 1980s and spared few other than Abdul Qadir and Phil Edmonds. Out of that gloom, Murali, Warne, Saqlain, and Harbhajan have whirled spin bowling into a fresh and vibrant sphere.

Most disturbingly, his scathing attack on Murali's action is uncharitable and offensive. His demand that Murali should be banned by ICC — even though it has cleared his action - is supported by arguments that do not appear in the rules of cricket. Since when, for example, has a front-on action meant that you are a chucker? Bedi sees the only legal version of cricket as side-on. This is old-fartism in its purist form. As is his assertion that there is no place in cricket for those born with a "defect". "It is just too bad," according to Bedi, and Murali and Shoaib should be thrown out of the game.

The Bedi we know and love clapped batsmen when they lofted him for six, and still flighted the next delivery. Call me an old fart but I prefer the spinning sardar of the seventies, not the barmy Bishan of 2002.

Kamran Abbasi, born in Lahore, brought up in Rotherham, is assistant editor of the British Medical Journal. His Asian View appears on Wisden.com every Friday.

Do you agree or disagree? Join in the debate by e-mailing feedback@wisden.com. Please note that we reserve the right to edit e-mails, and that views published are those of the reader concerned, not of Wisden Online.

More Kamran Abbasi
The inquiry that never was

Waqar is no Imran

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd