January 11, 2007	Thursday	Zilhaj 20, 1427

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KARACHI, Jan 10: Billy Doctrove, the West Indies umpire who officiated in the infamous Oval Test alongside Darrell Hair last August, has been appointed by the International Cricket Council to stand in the first two Tests of the South Africa-Pakistan series.

Doctrove, the 51-year-old Dominican, stood in the fourth and final England versus Pakistan Test when Hair brought the match to a controversial finish after incorrectly accusing Inzamam-ul-Haq’s team of ball-tampering with a five-run penalty to boot.

As a consequence, Pakistan became the first team ever to forfeit a Test in the game’s long history while Hair, the burly Australian official, lost his job on the ICC’s elite panel of umpires soon afterwards after demanding a hefty $500,000 payoff — a request which was austerely rejected by the game’s governing body.

Ironically, Doctrove has not supervised a Test since that bleak evening of Aug 20, 2006. But now he returns to partner his record-breaking West Indian colleague Steve Bucknor in the first Test which starts from Thursday at Centurion.

Doctrove, who has supervised nine Tests and has been on the elite panel since 2006, is also slated to stand in the second Test at Port Elizabeth starting from Jan 19, with Peter Parker, the 47-year-old Australian umpire on the ICC international panel.

Bucknor, world’s leading umpire with 115 Test appearances before Thursday, then takes up the charge with Parker in the third and final Test at Cape Town from Jan 26.

In sharp contrast to Bucknor, the 60-year-old Jamaican who has been in action since 1989, Parker is comparatively a junior umpire in the international arena. The rotund Queenslander has officiated in merely six Tests in a seven-year period from December 1993 to December 2000.

However, Parker is more experienced when it comes to One-day Internationals with 51 matches since making his debut as field umpire in the Australia versus South Africa fixture at Sydney on Dec 14, 1993.

He will also officiate in the first one-dayer between South Africa and Pakistan at Centurion on Feb 4 along with a local umpire.

Bucknor, with 151 ODIs under his belt, is scheduled to stand in the next two one-dayers — at Durban (Feb 7) and Port Elizabeth (Feb 9) — before handing over the ‘neutral’ umpire’s coat to Zimbabwe’s Russell Tiffin, who has 90 ODIs to his credit since October 1992.

Tiffin, the 47-year-old from Harare, will stand in the final two one-dayers at Cape Town (Feb 11) and Johannesburg (Feb 14), respectively.

Former England opening batsman Chris Broad, a no-nonsense match referee on the ICC panel with previous supervising experience of 20 Tests and 77 ODIs, will oversee both the Test and ODI series in South Africa in the next five weeks.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s representative on the ICC elite panel of umpires Aleem Dar will officiate in all three matches of the Chappell-Hadlee series — the annual ODI contest between Tasman rivals Australia and New Zealand — with local umpires.

The coming series is being played in New Zealand with matches scheduled for Wellington (Feb 16), Auckland (Feb 18) and Hamilton (Feb 20).