Vin­ode Mam­chan

West In­dies mys­tery spin­ner Sunil Nar­ine is be­ing tar­get­ed ac­cord­ing to crick­et of­fi­cials.Nar­ine was re­port­ed with a sus­pect bowl­ing ac­tion dur­ing the third ODI against Sri Lan­ka, which the home side won by 19 runs in Pallekele on Sat­ur­day.

The match of­fi­cials' re­port, which was hand­ed over to the West In­dies team man­age­ment af­ter the con­test, cit­ed con­cerns about the le­gal­i­ty of the 27-year-old's de­liv­er­ies.

Nar­ine's bowl­ing ac­tion will now be scru­ti­nised fur­ther un­der the ICC process re­lat­ing to sus­pect­ed il­le­gal bowl­ing ac­tions re­port­ed in Tests, ODIs and T20Is. He is re­quired to un­der­go test­ing with­in 14 days, and, dur­ing this pe­ri­od, Nar­ine is per­mit­ted to con­tin­ue bowl­ing in in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et un­til the re­sults of the test­ing are known.

For­mer West In­dies and T&T off-spin­ner Rangy Nanan said that he would like the um­pires to go in­to de­tail to ex­plain what they are see­ing when Nar­ine is bowl­ing: "I looked at the bowl­ing ac­tion of Nar­ine dur­ing the match­es and I am find­ing it dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand why they are call­ing him. His ac­tion looked good and this is very sur­pris­ing to me, so much so that I think he is be­ing tar­get­ed.

"He is the on­ly West In­di­an bowler that the op­po­si­tion around the world is afraid of and I think this is the rea­son he is be­ing tar­get­ed."

Echo­ing sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments was Phi­lo Wal­lace the for­mer West In­dies open­er and an­a­lyst on the Sports­drive show. "I am prob­a­bly blind be­cause from what I have seen of this man, he is bowl­ing well with­in the lim­its of what is al­lowed in terms of bend­ing of the arm by the ICC. I have looked at him close­ly and I can tell you from my ex­pe­ri­ence he is bowl­ing legal­ly.

"I saw a split screen on the last game of his bowl­ing and he is nice­ly side-on and when you adopt this po­si­tion, it is very dif­fi­cult to bend the arm be­yond 15 de­grees. In my opin­ion Nar­ine's ac­tion is even bet­ter than the Sri Lankan play­er Sa­chithra Senanayake who took four wick­ets in the T20 match."

Nar­ine's man­ag­er at Queen's Park Crick­et Club (QPCC), Jef­frey Guillen said he has sent a mes­sage to the em­bat­tled off-spin­ner, giv­ing his en­cour­age­ment and the club's com­mit­ment to con­tin­ue sup­port­ing him through­out this dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od. "I did send him a mes­sage telling him to keep the faith and of course let­ting him know that the club is fulling sup­port­ing him.

"Be­ing called all the time is sure to play on Sunil's mind, he has been bowl­ing with a clean ac­tion in my opin­ion and it is clear that he is be­ing tar­get­ed. He has passed all the tests that they have put him through and yet they are still find­ing ways to call him.

"I just can­not un­der­stand what is go­ing on here but what I know is that this con­stant pres­sure on the play­er is go­ing to do him no good. At this time all those around him needs to sup­port him ful­ly and hope­ful­ly he comes out still ef­fec­tive from this lat­est chal­lenge."