Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer inspects a white ball as he arrives at Lord’s for nets on Wednesday. (AP)

London/Melbourne: Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer wants the ball-tampering law to be abolished, saying it has become obsolete in modern-day cricket and umpires who have never played the game tend to apply the clause.

Woolmer said bowlers should be given some freedom to alter the condition of the ball so that it became “less of a batsman’s game”.

“The whole irony and tragedy of this particular story is Law 42.3. But law 42.3 is an ass. It was brought in because of ball-tampering with razor blades and bottle tops and everything else in the past, but that’s been shoved out of the game now. I’d scrub out the law completely,” said Woolmer, whose team was involved in Sunday’s sensational forfeiture of The Oval Test.

“I’d allow bowlers to use anything that naturally appears on the cricket field. They could rub the ball on the ground, pick the seam, scratch it with their nails — anything that allows the ball to move off the seam to make it less of a batsman’s game,” he was quoted as saying by a British daily.

He said many umpires had not been players themselves and so they would not understand the nuances of this.

“It should be looked at seriously by the MCC’s Laws Committee. Every single bowler I know from the time I played in 1968 to 1984 was guilty, at least under the current law, of some sort of ball-changing.

“If you haven’t played the game, like a lot of the umpires haven’t, they don’t know these things. The more laws you make to try to stop it being done, the more the players go the other way.”

Meanwhile, former international umpire from Australia Ross Emerson has said that ball-tampering has been going on for quite some time and umpires hesitate to take action against Asian teams fearing the repercussions.

“Ball-tampering has been going on for years,” said Emerson, who reported Pakistan for ball-tampering against Western Australia in 1995 and also reported Sri Lankan off-spinner Muttiah Muralidharan for chucking.

“There has been a number of occasions when there has been a suggestion or an allegation that a ball has been tampered with, but in the end most of the umpires don’t want to do anything about it,” he told a Melbourne newspaper.

Emerson said taking strong action against any country from the Asian sub-continent always ended up as a racial row.

“If you accuse the sub-continental sides of anything it becomes an international incident. It becomes country versus country and you are called a racist.”

Emerson welcomed fellow umpire Darrell Hair for “having the balls to take action” and said that most of the umpires hesitate to take action fearing pre-mature end to their careers.