THROUGH THE COVERS: ICC needs to be more pro-active
By Zaheer Abbas
SRI LANKAN off-spinner Muttaih Murlitharan is an individual everyone has an opinion about. Either you are with him or against him, but you cannot ignore his presence on the international stage. His recent decision not to tour Australia with his national team has given a new twist to the controversy that has unfortunately surrounded the illustrious career for long.
As I see it, the controversy should have ended once the ICC had cleared him — and it has done so more than once — but there are people who time and again find it to their liking to have a go against him. As if cricketers, both current and former, were not enough, the Australian prime minister added his weight to the lobby working against him, which, I think, was something not in good taste.
Every time politics and politicians get involved in sporting matters, the result almost always is less than pleasant. See what is happening in Zimbabwe, see what has become of Pakistan cricket, and see how long Pakistan and India could not meet on a field of play even though everyone wanted it to happen so desperately. They are all episodes that went awry because politics was allowed to fiddle with sports. And yet the Australian premier somehow found it proper to go public with his personal assessment of a seriously technical matter.
I have played cricket at the highest level for a good decade and a half, but still I have no comments to offer on the issue because I do not have the technical bio-mechanical expertise to make a judgment. I would rather leave it to the judgement of the ICC technical committee and the experts hired by it to tell us what it is, and I am quite willing to take it on face value.
The ICC should have put its feet down on the issue much more strongly than it actually did. I find it an ICC failure more than anything else. Either it is not too sure of the technology it is using, or does not have the moral courage to stand firmly by a player who happens to be the world record holder for most career scalps. It has been unnecessarily on the defensive and has allowed things to drift aimlessly, which, of course, is not the ideal way of conduct for a world body.
What the whole pre-tour episode has unfortunately ensured is that the series Down Under will now be contested at a much less intense level than what would have been the case had the Sri Lankans being playing at full strength. It is indeed unfair on the part of the Australian nation to manoeuvre an under-strength opponent on tour. I say the Australian nation because of the unnecessary involvement of the country’s head of government. Had it remained an issue within the cricketing fraternity — for instance, Bishen Bedi’s comments in the last couple of months — it would not have looked that bad, and would have certainly not had Murlitharan opting out of the tour. As things stand today, the Sri Lankans will be without the man who is one of the major reasons why they are where they are in the international arena.
By the looks of it, Australian leg spinner Shane Warne, the number two man behind Murli in the list of career toppers, may also not be able to take part in the series. Though his reasons are purely cricketing, it will still affect the intensity of the contest in the series which is such a pity.
SRI LANKAN off-spinner Muttaih Murlitharan is an individual everyone has an opinion about. Either you are with him or against him, but you cannot ignore his presence on the international stage. His recent decision not to tour Australia with his national team has given a new twist to the controversy that has unfortunately surrounded the illustrious career for long.
