Former England batsmen Ian Botham and Geoffrey Boycott on Monday lashed out at ICC, the game’s governing body, for making an ugly mess of the ball-tampering incident at The Oval on the fourth day of the final Test match between England and Pakistan.
According to Reuters, the ICC “charged Inzamam-ul-Haq on Monday with bringing the game into disrepute after his players refused to take the field against England. The hearing will take place in London on Friday”.
Boycott, in his typically hard-hitting column for Daily Telegraph on Monday, said the ICC had erred in the first place by appointing the controversial Aussie umpire Darrel Hair for the Test. “The ICC must be blind or stupid not to have realised that there is history between Darrell Hair, the umpire who accused them of changing the nature of the ball, and Pakistan,” wrote Boycott. “There were mutterings after the Headingley Test that Pakistan didn’t like Hair’s attitude. Pakistan regard Hair as an officious umpire and they don’t like his style of man-management.
“It should have been obvious to the ICC that appointing him to this series created a situation like a volcano waiting to erupt.”
Boycott’s views were endorsed by former England captain Ian Botham who dubbed the whole Sunday scenario as a case of poor management by the ICC. “They (ICC) are the mandarins who fiddled while the game slid towards anarchy at The Oval yesterday,” said Botham in his column for the Daily Mirror on Monday. “The ICC are the alleged governing body who left 23,000 paying spectators and millions of people tuning into TV and radio coverage completely in the dark. And they are the administrators who should have sorted out an unholy mess by separating hard fact from innuendo and supposition at the fourth Test, which will now be remembered for all the wrong reasons.
“They needed to make a statement specifying exactly why the ball was changed, what they had seen, who was involved and how often. Otherwise the whole Pakistan team stands accused of cheating,” lamented Botham.
Mike Selvey, the Guardian’s cricket correspondent and one of the most respected writers on the game, was furious: “That an international match of such profile can be terminated simply because two officials have had their integrity questioned – for that is what we are talking about here – is a disgrace to the game.
“If Hair and Doctrove feel a slight, then that can be no more than that felt by the Pakistan team, who have spent years living down the accusations of ball-tampering that were thrown at them in the early part of the last decade and the match-fixing scandals that followed later. But the game is more important than the feelings of the officials.”
Derek Pringle writes in the Daily Telegraph: “Hair’s feelings, and he will maintain he has played it by the book, should not really be part of the equation. ICC have five officials present at every Test and match referee Mike Procter should simply have replaced him and Doctrove, if he was in sympathy with his colleague, with the third and fourth umpires present and got on with the game.
“Hair could and should have played it differently. Unless he saw a player deliberately altering the condition of the ball, it is difficult to claim tampering by condition alone. While there appeared to be scuffs and striations when television zoomed in on the ball, Pietersen and Alastair Cook could have caused those when hitting it into boundary boards and beyond.”
Simon Barnes, commented in The Times: “Sky, not short of cameras or curiosity, was unable to find any footage of a guilty player doing some sneaky thing to the ball. All we have, then, is Hair’s judgment: Hair’s punishment: Hair’s abdication: Hair’s creation of one the great periodic scandals in cricket history. All I can say is that he’d bloody well better be bloody well sure that he was bloody well right.”
John Ethridge of The Sun, a paper that hasn’t been backwards in condemning Pakistan in the past, wrote: “An 18-stone Aussie called Darrell Hair trampled his feet all over the name of cricket with an astonishing display of pig-headedness. Umpire Hair’s refusal to see sense or abandon his misguided pride meant England became the first team in history to win a Test match by forfeit.
“Hair was the central figure in a bewildering day of controversy, anger, stubbornness and ultimately disgrace. Everybody else — the players, the Boards, the match referee and most of all the 12,000 spectators with tickets for today — wanted the Fourth Test to be completed. But Hair plonked his considerable bulk in the way as a row over ball-tampering escalated into a Test match being curtailed a day and a session early.”
On Sunday, the Sky commentary team was also unanimous in their amazement, first at Hair’s decision to reprimand Pakistan and then in his reluctance to continue with the match. It may be no surprise that Ramiz Raja and others who are fond of Pakistan, like Nasser Hussain and David Lloyd, express dismay at the treatment they received, but it is quite something when Ian Botham, a man disliked by many Pakistan supporters for his past criticisms of their players and their country, comes out so unequivocally in favour of Pakistan’s protest.
LONDON: Pakistan’s troubled cricket tour of England may come to an abrupt end if captain Inzamam-ul-Haq is found guilty of ball tampering in a hearing with the sport’s governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), on Friday, their coach Bob Woolmer said on Monday. The former England batsman told Channel Four News that the players were completely behind Inzamam following the controversial decision by Australian umpire Darrell Hair to find him guilty of tampering with the ball on Sunday in the fourth Test. “It is not an easy question to answer at the moment,” Woolmer said in response to a question about the upcoming one-day series going ahead. “I would think that the one-day tournament may be in jeopardy if he is found guilty and suspended for eight games. If the punishment was suspended then it might go ahead. After what has happened the players are right behind their captain.”—AFP