McGrath and Gillespie back new law

Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie have come out in favour of ICC's new rule regarding bowling actions. After comprehensive testing, the ICC recommended that bowlers could straighten their arm up to 15 degrees and both supported having a common limit for all variety of bowlers.

"I think it's a great thing," Gillespie told the Sydney Morning Herald. "It's one universal law, rather than having different degrees of flexation, which I think is near impossible to police."

McGrath was also in favour of standardising the testing procedure and said, "At least you've got a benchmark. I know they go into the lab afterwards, which, to me, is nothing like a match situation. You can do whatever you want and change your action. But when you're out in the middle, if they can have a standard testing procedure ... I'm all for it.

"When I found out that the testing could be done in match situations with high-speed cameras, and a few of us had already been tested, I started thinking it was a good idea. It already shows that people like myself and Shaun Pollock who people say have pretty sound actions, that we have a bit of a flex of 10-12 degrees."

Stephen Fleming, the New Zealand captain, said it was important that the players could see the evidence and "knee-jerk reactions" were avoided. "It shouldn't be secretive and names [of suspected bowlers] shouldn't be put up without basis," he said. "There's a lot of emotion around chucking and I'm very conservative on this topic."

Fleming was due to meet today with Tim May, a member of the ICC's cricket committee which endorsed the recommendations, while May spoke to Ricky Ponting yesterday. "I think it's a bit clearer now," Ponting said. "It's good to hear it from Tim but we still need to know a bit more about it."