UWA's retention was premised on three broad steps of action. The first was to implement a number of technical recommendations specific to the testing protocol. The next step was to standardise these protocols, before finally executing them across a number of testing centres (with UWA driving the expansion).
The ICC says it did not get past the first step, and from that point the rift turned into an outright dispute. In March this year UWA officially withdrew their services. To them it had become an intellectual-rights dispute, centred on the usage of the testing protocols. "One testing centre was never going to be sufficient and we at UWA agreed with the need for expansion but not the handing over of our intellectual property (developed from 1995 onwards) to the ICC to use in the new centres without some recognition of such," Daryl Foster, a former coach and biomechanics expert at the lab, said to me in an email.
The ICC disagrees, claiming to have used a combination of existing public research and expert views from within to develop a different protocol. It suggests that UWA was attempting to exploit its testing monopoly by planning to charge licence and training fees to the new centres, and that they approached one such centre with a quote without telling the ICC.
In mid-October, Alderson of UWA complained to ESPNcricinfo about the "lack of transparency surrounding the current [ICC] testing". At a press conference in Dubai in late October, Geoff Allardice, the ICC's General Manager-Cricket and the man overseeing the current drive, had an ice-cold retort. "The accusations by UWA were based on the fact that they hadn't seen [the protocols]. We haven't got a relationship with them so weren't going to give it to them." Allardice said that several biomechanists were providing the ICC with regular feedback on their protocols, and these were also the subject of an external review. "All the results we have seen so far are very encouraging with the testing system."
The protocols are different because, as one official familiar with both says, "there is no right way or wrong way of measuring 15 degrees". UWA's Alderson has publicly expressed her concerns, for example, about how the ICC identifies the moment of ball release, especially for spinners, and where markers are placed. On the other hand, in the new protocols there seems to be a significant advance in matching the bowler's action in a lab to that in the game he or she was reported in.
