“It conforms to the Laws of Cricket and will not be legislated against.”

A batsman has two hands on the bat, so his stronger hand alway has some control over the weaker. If you bowl with your ‘wrong’ hand, you can’t use the other one, too.

The only bowler I have come across in the first class game who could bowl equally well with either hand was Aftab Habib – and in his case ‘equally well’ meant ‘not very well at all’.

[As an aside, it would be interesting to see how Darren Gough would fare, as he bowls right handed but writes left handed]

Daniel Vettori made an interesting point about the fairness of this stroke. He said that the legislators need to decide how wides are adjudicated when the batsman turns round.

This is important in limited-overs cricket because the wide law is strictly applied and is asymetric – wides are called much closer to the leg stump than the off.

If the “leg stump” is fixed at the start of the bowler’s run up (when the ball comes into play) then the bowler’s options are very severely restricted when he delivers the ball. Anything outside what is now the off stump is a wide. Anything straighter is easy to hit (if you are KP!).

I’m not saying the Law or the playing conditions should be changed – just that this makes KP’s innovation more and more interesting. Who will be next to try it? Dhoni?

Given the mechanics of bowling, this means the bowler has to decide at the start of his run-up which hand he will use or his feet would end up in the wrong place and he would fall over and look a tit.

I see no functional reason why he should have to tell the umpire which hand he proposes to use, still less the batsman. However, Law 24.1 says he must do so.

Pietersen has the freedom within the Laws to experiment. The bowler does not. Fair? Maybe not, but it’s difficult to imagine a bowler so ambidextrous that he can bowl with sufficient control with either arm. And the investment he would have to make to learn to do so would be greater than learning to bowl a variety of deliveries with one arm.

In both cases the answer seems related to time. Bowlers do change from over the wicket to round, but they do this before starting their run-up. The umpire has to change position, as does the non-striker.

When it comes to changing hands at the start of the run-up, I see no problem. But a bowler changing hands just before releasing the ball? I think it would be physically taxing to say the very least, if not bordering on the impossible.

Somehow I don’t think that would happen, so we might as well say “ok, let bowlers do it if they want to”. David Gower asked Ian Botham the same question, and Botham couldn’t even imagine a bowler trying.

Anyway, there is no earthly reason why the batsman and bowler have to have symmetric rights. They do different things.