Vin­ode Mam­chan

T&T and West In­dies off-spin­ner Sunil Nar­ine is not giv­ing up so eas­i­ly as far as his ca­reer in the In­di­an Pre­mier League (IPL) is con­cerned.The mys­tery spin­ner was told by the Board of Con­trol for Crick­et in In­dia that he can­not bowl his stock de­liv­ery, the "off-spin­ner" in any crick­et match or­gan­ised by them.

Nar­ine, on the ad­vise of of­fi­cials at the Kolkata Knight Rid­ers team, de­cid­ed to re-take the test yes­ter­day in Chen­nai at the ICC-ac­cred­it­ed Sri Ra­machan­dra Arthroscopy and Sports Sci­ences Cen­tre.Af­ter a fair amount of his de­liv­er­ies were re­port­ed by the match of­fi­cials dur­ing Knight Rid­ers' away match against Sun­ris­ers Hy­der­abad on April 22, Nar­ine un­der­went test­ing last week­end.

The tests re­vealed that Nar­ine had a flex in his el­bow while de­liv­er­ing the off­spin de­liv­ery. Con­se­quent­ly, the BC­CI, while al­low­ing Nar­ine to play in the IPL, made it clear that he could not bowl his stock ball. Among oth­er de­liv­er­ies that were test­ed and cleared were his knuck­le ball and straighter de­liv­ery.

A source close to the Ari­ma man told the T&T Guardian: "Sunil did an­oth­er test and he is con­fi­dent that he will get the all clear in a few days time. He felt good bowl­ing the off-spin­ner dur­ing the tests in South In­dia and is look­ing for­ward to get­ting back in­to ac­tion with his full reper­toire of de­liv­er­ies avail­able at his dis­pos­al.

"He has shown tremen­dous strength dur­ing this or­deal and will get past this. He just needs to un­der­stand that there is some­thing called 'mus­cle mem­o­ry' so it is eas­i­er for him to slip back in­to his old ac­tion. He needs to fo­cus deeply on his bowl­ing and with re­peat­ed prac­tice he would be able to adapt nice­ly to the new ac­tion. De­spite what he is go­ing through, his ca­reer is far from over, he is too strong of a char­ac­ter to give is eas­i­ly."

Nar­ine did not play in yes­ter­day's win by the KKR over the pow­er­ful Chen­nai Su­per Kings. In­stead his coun­try­man An­dre Rus­sell scored a half cen­tu­ry to take the KKR to an easy win.