Not ‘cricket’s darkest hour’

23 August 2006

Leo McKinstry says that the Pakistani players have behaved like spoilt children and that the sport has survived far worse controversies than this flurry of feeble pique

Yet, unlike the tantrum-throwing Pakistanis, Lever and the England team reacted with utter stoicism. There was no hysterical talk of wounded national pride, no explosive protest. They just went on with the match and the series, eventually emerging triumphant by three Tests to one. The Indian skipper, Bedi, was a man well used to controversy. Earlier in the year, during a Test against the West Indies, he had declared his team’s second innings prematurely closed in protest at the intimidatory nature of the opposition’s pace bowling. In effect, he, not the present Pakistani leader Inzamam-ul-Haq, was the first Test captain to forfeit a game by refusing to participate, a fact which undermines some of the overexcited talk this week about the ‘unprecedented’ nature of events at the Oval.

Indeed, it is absurd that a dispute over a cricket ball in the fag end of a Test series should have been elevated into a geopolitical incident, winning far more media coverage than civil unrest in Iraq, home-grown terrorism or Iran’s nuclear programme. The fraught international situation has, of course, made the present cricket crisis unusually combustible. In a climate where Muslims at home and abroad are constantly complaining of Western prejudice and discrimination, the accusation of cheating only reinforces the siege mentality. On the very weekend that the Oval Test descended into a shambles, it emerged that a group of holidaymakers at Malaga airport had refused to board a plane because they were disturbed by the appearance and behaviour of two male Muslim passengers. To many of the followers of Islam, this was nothing more than blatant racial prejudice — as was the decision on Sunday by the Australian umpire Darrell Hair to penalise the Pakistan team to the tune of five runs for alleged ball-tampering. Tellingly, Hair, who has long been accused of bias against cricketers from the subcontinent, was this week denounced in Pakistan as a ‘Hitler in a white coat’, just as Bush and Blair are continually portrayed as imperialist, racist bullies.

Anxiety over race is exacerbated by the suggestion that Hair’s action might have been prompted by the England coach Duncan Fletcher, a tough, taciturn white Zimbabwean who, according to latest reports, advised the match authorities to keep a close eye on the Pakistanis’ handling of the ball. In the same way, the match referee Mike Proctor, whose decision-making will be crucial to the outcome of this crisis, is a white South African and a close friend of Fletcher’s.