CAUGHT OUT in some childish misdemeanour, my answer was always the same: `I don't care, Mum!' My punishment was equally predictable: a slap over the wrist and the sermon that `Don't Care was made to care!'

Modern fast bowlers could do with about a month of my mum's treatment. I open my 1992 Wisden and find that in five Tests against England in 1991, the West Indian bowlers sent down 140 balls that were not. Did they care about the fact that they worked 23.2 overs overtime? Not on your nelly! Do Test bowlers spend sleepless nights worrying about the largesse and bonus runs they distribute to opposing batsmen in tight matches? I don't see any dark rings under their eyes!

Look at the indifference displayed to no-balls by Messrs Ambrose, Bishop, Patterson, Walsh, Benjamin, Cummins, McDermott, Hughes and Waugh during the 1992–93 Australia- West Indies series. Take the Adelaide Test: the game which, if Australia had won, would have wrapped up the series by giving the home team an unbeatable 2–0 lead. In the final analysis Richie Richardson's side won by a solitary run. Had the West Indian bowlers not sent down eight more illegal deliveries than their Australian counterparts, their triumph might have been slightly more comfortable. But if the Australian bowlers had not `not delivered' 24 balls, their side would have won the match by one wicket – and the series 2–1!

And surely there can be nothing more frustrating for a bowler than to out-think, defeat and theoretically dismiss a batsman, only to be defeated himself by the technicality of a law which finds him stepping half-an-inch beyond the acceptable limits? One must take trouble about such minor details. After all, did not Frederick the Great say that `genius means the transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all'?

Picture if you can an inhospitable day on Derby's Racecourse ground. The rain had stopped most inopportunely for Northants – just after Donald Carr won the toss and sent us in on a green-top against those two expert rib-ticklers Cliff Gladwin and Les Jackson. The two pacemen stalked to the ends of their run-ups and two piles of sawdust which awaited them. Having stuck their front-loader hands into the shavings, they wandered back towards the stumps, occasionally depositing a handful on the slippery turf. When they began to bowl, they stepped with absolute precision on each and every yellow patch which they had surveyed and laid down! To confirm my assessment of Derbyshire's miserly attitude to no-balls, I flicked through my 1955 Wisden. By my inexpert computation, Derbyshire conceded only 15 no-balls in as many home matches in 1954! Most teams could exceed that in one game in 1993.

THESE DELIVERIES by the author during his rampaging tour of Australia in 1954–55 would have infringed the no-ball law as it then stood (back foot) and also under the modern regulation governing the front foot. Frank Tyson, in these instances 39 years ago, escaped punishment, but attention to the law has since been tightened up. In this article he comes up with suggestion for easing the bowler's front-foot torment

Part of the explanation for the modern blow-out in no-ball budgets probably lies in the harshness of the umpires' interpretation of the present front-foot law. But new regulations are not a blanket excuse for the epidemic of no-balls currently afflicting first-class cricket. An uncaring and illogical attitude towards the importance of no-balls is a more valid reason.

Go to any club net practice anywhere in the world and one of the first things which strikes the observer is that very ordinary medium-pace bowlers are frightening a year's growth out of reasonably accomplished batsmen by bowling from 17 yards! Tax the miscreants with overstepping the popping-crease and they protest that they `never do that in matches'. Yet they start their approaches in haphazard fashion, sometimes stepping off with their right foot and sometimes their left. They miss their marker at the end of their run by as much as six inches and wonder why they stray over the batting-crease by a similar margin!

Judging from the reaction of the administrators to the plethora of no-balls, they are of the Dostoevsky school: they believe in Crime and Punishment. As the misdemeanour of bowling no-balls has become more prevalent, they have sought to discourage the trend by increasing the severity of the penalty imposed. At the present moment Australia has an experimental law which debits the offender with two runs and allows the batsman the bonus of any incremental runs he can score off the illegal delivery. But as any medico or therapist will tell you, prevention and cure are better than punishment. Punishment is a negative influence. To be effective, the punishment has to increase in intensity with each offence committed. Bowlers will become accustomed to a two-run penalty because they assume their opponents will send down a proportionate number of similar balls. Double the penalty for each successive offence and the criminals would become worried. But the umpire's sentence would not necessarily cure the fault.

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