THE 200-YEAR GOLDEN AGE OF RULE-BENDING

On this day – that is to say, 3 November – in 1978, three overs from the end of the decisive one-day international of a three-match series against Pakistan, India found themselves requiring 23 runs to win with eight wickets remaining, minutes away from a perfectly humdrum victory. The day, however, was about to get very unusual indeed, starting when Pakistan’s Sarfraz Nawaz began his seventh over with a wild bouncer that flew high out of the reach of Anshuman Gaekwad and plopped into the gloves of his wicketkeeper, Wasim Bari. The Pakistani umpire lodged no objection, and so Sarfraz bowled another, and another, and then one more, knowing that without the umpire’s interference the concession of a run was not even theoretically possible.

Bishan Bedi, India’s captain and a team-mate at Northants of both Sarfraz and the Pakistani captain Mushtaq Mohammad, watched this from the balcony with a growing sense of fury. Four balls into the over, with his side still well placed for victory but with his sense of fair play mortally offended, he called the batsmen in and conceded the match and the series.

It is impossible to discuss this incident without taking a couple of historical detours, the most obviously relevant having happened a couple of years earlier, the last time Bedi made a stand against the use of bouncers. That came at the culmination of a(nother) bad-tempered series, in the West Indies, with Bedi himself provoking the initial feelings of resentment during the first Test when, exercising his rights according to the letter of the law, he had refused the injured Viv Richards leave to retire hurt. Though he eventually relented the damage had been done and before the tour ended the sides were to be involved in a Test of historical hostility.

In the fourth, final and decisive meeting in Kingston, West Indies won the toss and chose to field, immediately launching a barrage of fast bowling of such brutish venom that in the first innings Gaekwad was hit in the ear, Brijesh Patel was hit in the mouth and Gundappa Viswanath broke a finger, all three of them requiring hospitalisation.

Bedi, who sniffed that the West Indian cocktail of approximately three-parts bouncers, two-parts beamers and the occasional yorker was “not part of the game” and “a deliberate effort to subdue us”, eventually declared his first innings at 306 for six just before he himself would have had to bat, and only six Indians were fit to participate in the second knock. West Indies were eventually set a paltry target of 13, and duly won by 10 wickets. Sunil Gavaskar said the way local fans cheered their team’s assault “proved beyond a shadow of doubt that these people still belonged to the jungle and forests instead of civilised country”, while the West Indies captain Clive Lloyd insisted: “This is cricket – if you get hit you have to take it.”

Clearly Bedi – who during his retirement has been a vocal campaigner against perceived chucking, leading to a long-running feud with Muttiah Muralitharan (“His wickets are mere run-outs in my eyes. That man is the best shot-putter in the history of cricket”) – was an individual whose approach to the rules was as pure as his famously impeccable bowling action.

India’s visit to Pakistan in 1978-79 was of not just sporting but political significance, marking as it did the teams’ first meeting for nearly 18 years, during which time there had been two wars on the subcontinent. Though the tourists were lavishly welcomed at the airport, neither side can be accused of approaching their cricket in an atmosphere of reconciliatory bonhomie.

The start of the final day’s play in the first Test was delayed by 11 minutes because Gavaskar was busy arguing with Shakoor Rana, the umpire who was to provoke Mike Gatting into one of the most notorious instances of on-field rag-losing nine years later. In the second Test, which ended two days before the controversial third ODI, India’s Mohinder “Jimmy” Amarnath was laid out by an Imran Khan bouncer, went to hospital for x-rays and then returned to the ground to resume his innings, whereupon he was welcomed, first ball back, by a Sarfraz bumper aimed at his unprotected, helmet-free head.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest India’s Mohinder “Jimmy” Amarnath is laid out by an Imran Khan bouncer during the 2nd Test against Pakistan in 1978-79. Photograph: Patrick Eagar/Getty Images

When Pakistan – whose team was quite exceptional at the time, containing not only Imran and Sarfraz but also Javed Miandad, Asif Iqbal, Mudassar Nazar and Zaheer Abbas – won that match, ending a run of 13 successive draws between the sides, the nation declared a public holiday.

Amarnath’s heroic return to the crease was, incidentally, not a one-off for a player who built a reputation for fearlessness, if not necessarily for technical excellence, in the face of the short ball. “What separated Jimmy from the others was his great ability to withstand pain,” said Michael Holding, who was in the West Indies side when Amarnath had several teeth knocked out by Malcolm Marshall at the Kensington Oval in 1983 only to again resume batting after a quick trip to hospital. “A fast bowler knows when a batsman is in pain, but Jimmy would stand up and continue.”

Not only was he naturally disinclined to back down, he would have been further motivated in Pakistan given that the second Test was played in Lahore, where his father, Lala Amarnath – famous for being the first man to score a Test century for India and for so emphatically falling out with the Maharajah of Vizianagram, his team’s egomaniacal captain, that he was sent home from the tour of England in 1936 – had been brought up. Lala was commentating on the match for Pakistani television, and to add to the sense of family occasion Jimmy’s elder brother, Surinder, was also in the India side.

“There is no doubt that we were up against a better and more determined home team,” Bedi wrote, many years later. “What took us by much greater surprise was the extreme hostility from the public and the media – and the umpires, if I may say so. Lest I sound like a bad loser, let me assure all and sundry that we were comprehensively beaten by a much superior team. If the overall cricket environment did not suit us, well, it was not supposed to.”

The perception of bias in Pakistani (and global) officiating led directly to the adoption of neutral umpires, while the ICC acted in 1991 against the overuse of bouncers. It would be hard to argue that either of these decisions have hurt the sport in any way, and anyone old enough to remember Gatting’s altercation with Rana cannot help but marvel occasionally at the standard of modern umpiring, which has allowed, for example, the participants in the current series between England and Pakistan to concentrate entirely (if not always successfully) on their own pursuit of excellence.

Sarfraz’s four bouncers thus deserve a small footnote in the history of a sport which has been to a great extent shaped by miscreants and their misdemeanours, by the panicked closure of loopholes shortly after they have been exploited and a succession of administrators who are apparently totally unable to spot a stable door, let alone bolt one, until someone has already guided a horse through it.

The golden age of rule-bending started perhaps in 1771, when Chertsey’s Thomas White attempted to avoid dismissal by using a bat that was as wide as the wicket – as celebrated by Mike Selvey in the Spin but a few weeks ago – and lasted for in excess of 200 years. Highlights include Mike Brearley’s decision to place every English fielder, including the wicketkeeper, on the rope to prevent West Indies scoring the boundary they needed to win an ODI in 1979 and Trevor Chappell’s infamous underarm delivery to Brian McKechnie, with identical intent, during a game between Australia and New Zealand two years later. (To return to somewhere approaching where we started, when India’s Ravi Shastri was asked if he would ever adopt a similar tactic, he replied: “Against Pakistan I would.”)

Laws continue to be tweaked in response to players’ innovations – there was an update this September to clarify the rules regulating the movement of fielders before a batsman hits the ball, a response to Steve Smith’s sprint from slip into the leg side to catch Pakistan’s Fawad Alam in Abu Dhabi last year – but sledging aside instances of outright villainy no longer appear to be part of the game.

Again, this isn’t exactly a bad thing, and one can only imagine how frustrating it would have been to be, say, a paying customer at Worcester on the day in 1979 when Somerset’s Brian Rose declared his team’s innings after one over and a single run in order to exploit a loophole in the regulations of the Benson & Hedges Cup and guarantee his side’s progress, but over time these tales have become part of the game’s cherished folklore. In the week of Halloween, and on the anniversary of one of its most egregious examples, it is perhaps pertinent to mark the death of devilry.

This is an extract taken from the Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe just visit this page, find ‘The Spin’ and follow the instructions.