Sir Richard Hadlee has renewed his call to legalise ball tampering as the world's best batsmen keep plundering runs against battered bowlers.
Australian writers believe that flat test pitches hastened fast bowler Mitchell Johnson's decision to retire and are suggesting quick bowling might be in its death throes because so many factors are against it.
Veteran Daily Telegraph cricket correspondent Robert Craddock writes that in his upcoming television interview with Hadlee, the great Kiwi bowler says "he could see no problem with bowlers being able to use natural forces such as their fingernails to work on the ball."
Craddock said Hadlee still wanted items such as bottle-tops banned as tampering aids.
Craddock believes allowing ball tampering would be a justified response to batsmen gaining an advantage through the use of much bigger bats. The balls were hardly sacred objects anyway, with at least 11 being replaced when Australia and New Zealand drew the test in Perth.
There were mammoth individual and team scores in that just completed test, along with regular totals in the 400s and 500s in Australia during the past year.
"Half of these scores were made by an Australian side which, quite frankly, is not that good at batting," wrote Craddock, who believed evidence was "mounting in Hadlee's favour".
"These statistics tell a simple story of decks which weighed too heavily in the batsmen's favour."
Hadlee first publicly stated his ball tampering ideas in a column 20 years ago.
"It is time to legalise ball-tampering in cricket - I can already hear the gasps from the game's conservatives, but I am deadly serious," he wrote.
"But there have been subtle ways over the years of mucking about with the ball that allows it to do things like reverse swing after 40 or 50 overs and takes the batsman by surprise.
"As long as the bowlers or fielders use whatever means they have on their persons, I don't see anything wrong with it. I'm talking about the use of a finger nail to scratch the ball, not bottle tops or those sort of things."
