Sydney: Harbhajan Singh is expected to become the first bowler in elite cricket to benefit from a relaxation of rules on chucking, an Australian bio-mechanics expert has said.

The new ICC rule, which comes into effect on March 1, allows bowlers to bend their elbows by up to 15 degrees. Harbhajan was reported for a suspect bowling action late last year and has been assessed by expert Bruce Elliott of the University of Western Australia, who supervised a high-speed camera test on the cricketer in Perth last Thursday.

Elliott said his report to the ICC and the BCCI on Harbhajan would be based on the new ICC rule, which will deem almost all modern bowling actions legal.

This would be of benefit to Harbhajan, who was reported by English Match Referee Chris Broad during last December?s Test series in Bangladesh for his doosra, a delivery which turns away from the right-handers instead of coming into them like a normal off-break.

?I am assuming the reference to angles will be under the new (ICC) regulations,? Elliott told a newspaper. ?That?s the way I will write the report.?

Elliott said he had not yet examined the footage taken at the university?s human movement laboratory but he was confident Harbhajan had bowled with similar intensity to Test match conditions.

?We can make a comparison to the video from the match when he was reported ? these are things such as ball speed, arm rotation, position of the body and technique,? Elliott told the newspaper.

?We had two arbiters in Daryl Foster and Harbhajan himself to give a ranking to each delivery so that we were confident they were quality deliveries.?

Foster, a former coach of the Western Australian state side, has been closely involved in helping bowlers such as Muttiah Muralidharan undergo testing and remedial work at the Perth University. (AFP)