Darrell Hair and the future of cricket

Dr Kamal Wickremasinghe

Darrell Bruce Hair is an Australian, born in the provincial town of Mudgee, New South Wales. He has played, without distinction, two seasons of first and second grade cricket as a medium pace bowler with the North Sydney and Mosman cricket clubs. Hair was not amongst the ICC’s inaugural ‘elite’ panel of umpires announced in 2002.

Darrell Hair is a plague on cricket. Once again he has chosen to throw his considerable weight around, asserting his authority borrowed from the ICC. This garbage bag of a man has once again, made himself and the colonial game of cricket a joke in the eyes of the majority of its players and fans.

Hare's cricketing atrocity at The Oval against the Pakistanis is the final confirmation of his pathological racist attitude towards the south Asian people. It also marks the latest episode in a disgraceful umpiring career that should end by this coming weekend, (if Ranjan Madugalle respects the sacrifices of his ancestors).

Despite the reprehensible racism ingrained in Hair’s actions, the more significant issue that emerges from this saga is his incompetence. Despite his apparent inflated belief of his own greatness and attempts to portray an image of a cricket umpire with a mission to uphold the rules and traditions of the game, this man is not fit to don the white coat. His idiotic enforcement of the cricket rules shows that Hair is not fit to be included in the panel of ‘elite’ umpires.

Hair first displayed his incompetence in his infamous foray into controversy (on Boxing Day, 1995) by calling Muralitharan for 'chucking’: he made a fool of himself during the rest of the two-day Australian innings by allowing Murali to bowl 32 more overs without protest, watching from square leg (which would have allowed him to make a better judgement about Murali's bowling action). He lost any remaining credibility by his subsequent effort to make money out of his disgraceful deed.

Hair’s latest act beats the first one in the ignominy stakes!
The cricket 'law' relevant to ball tampering (Law 42.3) explains that it is “unfair for anyone to rub the ball on the ground for any reason, interfere with any of the seams on the surface of the ball, use any implement, or take any other action whatsoever which is likely to alter the condition of the ball. (polishing the ball and removing mud from it and drying a wet ball on a towel is allowed). It further states that in “the event of any fielder changing the condition of the ball unfairly … the umpires shall award five penalty runs to the batting side.”

As is clear from its construction, contravening this law requires: a) visible damage to the ball (beyond normal wear and tear), and b) one or more players of the fielding team have been responsible for the damage. Hair has taken his disgraceful action without establishing either of these facts. Without having any evidence that the match ball had been damaged, and the Pakistani team was responsible for any such damage, Hair decided to penalise the Pakistanis and ultimately 'award' the match to England. His application of the law shows lack of knowledge about the rule.

According to the Pakistani captain Inzamam "At first he refused to show me the ball … I argued that it was my right to see it and he relented. There was nothing wrong with it. It looked like a normal 56-over ball which had visited the boundary a few times." "He didn't mention a bowler who was at fault - and he didn't mention any evidence, only that he was changing the ball".

Since hare’s decision, the analysis of miles of video footage from 25 cameras and umpteen still photographs has not pointed to any evidence to back Hair’s decision.

The reason why he paid attention to the ball (which had on several occasions been belted over the boundary and on to the concrete perimeter at The Oval) due to an England batsman being bowled due to ‘reverse swing’! (He had inspected the ball 16 minutes before the change was made, when another batsman was beaten by a ball that did reverse swing.

Clearly, in his polluted mind, he seems to hold the belief that sub continental people are not capable of such deeds without resorting to foul play).

This is despite the well-known skills of Pakistani players like Mohammad Asif (who played at Leicestershire earlier in the season) in the art of swing in all its guises.

By awarding five penalty runs to England in the absence of evidence that a particular player has contravened the law by any of the actions specified, Hair has demonstrated again, that he has no idea what the Laws of Cricket mean. He is supposedly an 'elite' umpire!

But those of us who are familiar with Australian cricket have a duty to inform the Sri Lankans (and cricket followers in general) that Hair's story is an integral part of the story of cricket since the late 1980s when Australia staged a revival.

You see, up to the early 80s, the West Indians led by Clive Lloyd had battered the Australians so badly that they were beginning to develop an inferiority complex, fuelled by the underlying racist attitudes. Their humiliation by the prowess of a West Indian team with a battery of immense fast bowling talent well-led by Clive Lloyd raised important questions about their fundamental belief systems about the colour of skin (or the lack of it) and its correlation with mental and physical prowess. The 'straw that broke the camel's back' was the defeat of Kim Hughes's team in 1985, leading to his resignation, in tears.

Allan Border reluctantly accepted captaincy and the appointment of Bob Simpson as coach marked a new beginning. Simpson clearly introduced the concept of a racial 'obligation' of the Australians to defeat the West Indies and to regain world supremacy in cricket, probably as a means of cementing the team purpose and morale.

Particularly dour players like Steven Waugh (a player without grace and with obvious limitations as a test batsman, especially against the rising ball) and Glen McGrath became the vanguard of this new structure. Having been previously beaten 'black and blue' by the West Indian fast bowling armada, and by Curtly Ambrose in particular, Waugh ‘hated’ the West Indies with gusto. This group appeared to attribute their failure to being 'nice guys' and they seemed to adopt a policy of being deliberately 'mean' to touring teams. Low rung teams like the Sri Lankans suffered the most under this policy.

Australian umpires and the sports journalists were an integral part of this brave new world: umpiring decisions, led by Hair and his mentor Dick French were unapologetically partisan. (The stench of one 'caught behind' decision against Mohammed Azharuddin, the captain of a hapless Indian touring team refuses to leave the mind: the ball bowled by Craig McDermott went past Azharuddin, at least two feet outside the leg stump, the wicket keeper appealed and Hair gave him out!). On the contrary, Sri Lanka's Graeme Labrooy who got his prodigious outswingers going in Tasmania and had Steven Waugh and Dean Jones 'clearly' caught behind. But they were both given not out by French and they both went on to score centuries!

This Mafia-like combination of the cricket team, umpires led by Hair and the media cheer squad worked in collusion to try and remove the biggest threat they recognised world cricket to their impending greatness: Muttiah Muralitharan.

Border had found Murali unplayable in Colombo and soon the system was hatching a plot to eliminate this perceived 'menace' from world cricket, questioning his unorthodox bowling action. On Boxing Day 1995, when Hair 'called' Murali, not only had he pre-determined his atrocity, he had conveyed to the friendly media before the match started, the message to anticipate some thing ‘big’. One of the leaders of the Australian media cheer-squad, a Sydney based cricket writer and friend of Hair, Phil Wilkins, had been all over the media centre, unable to hide his excitement about the impending event. (It is also revealing that he came out of retirement in the Austalian media today, to defend Hair's actions in the latest incident against the Pakistanis).

This pathetic history shows the disgraceful behaviour displayed by this individual towards the Sri Lankans, Indians (ask Surav Ganguly) and now the Pakistanis.

There is also evidence that Hair has been up to his usual tricks on this occasion. England's players (Marcus Trescothick, once he was out), have been watching Pakistan's players through binoculars, presumably to gather evidence of ball tampering.

It has also emerged that England coach Duncan Fletcher (a former Rhodesian with good racist credentials) had been seen speaking with the match referee Mike Procter, ((the two were colleagues in the Rhodesian side of the 1970s), leading to suggestions that collusion between this group of racists may have sparked the incident. Fletcher has also dropped hints to Sky TV during the last Test, suggesting that the cameramen should home in more on the ball when Pakistan was fielding.

Needless to say, England's coach is hardly operating from the moral high ground: the dramatic and consistent reverse swing generated in the last Ashes series by England bowlers, helping them win the series raised many questions and theAustralian fast bowler Nathan Bracken was convinced that England were using a sugar solution to coat the ball,.

Hair has refused to comment about the meeting and his 'ruling', but Fletcher's involvement clearly explains the umpire's sudden decision to inspect and change the ball. The circumstantial evidence for Fletcher also drawing Procter's attention to Pakistan's alleged ball tampering is pretty strong.

If the ICC does not put an end to this man’s ability to bring the game of cricket to disrepute, the developing world needs to think about forming its own cricketing infrastructure.