Diary - 1 September 2006

Inevitably, at this time of year, it has been a fortnight dominated by cricket. It began in extraordinary fashion. The Oval, where I was working, became the scene of a unique event in the sport: the first time that a Test match had been forfeited by one team refusing to take the field. The team was Pakistan and the umpire who sparked off the row was Darrell Hair, after he accused the Pakistan team of cheating. In the commentary box we scoured hours of footage to try to find any visual evidence of ball-tampering, but we couldn’t find a thing. Since then I have not changed my opinion: if there was ball-tampering, it was minor and therefore could and should have been handled with far greater sensitivity by the umpire in question. A quiet word with Inzamam-ul-Haq, at the point at which Hair was concerned, and none of this would have happened. All kinds of nonsense followed the ‘conclusion’ of the match. That cricket was in crisis and wouldn’t recover. The truth is that cricket has been, and always will be, the most controversial of games, and this episode is simply a further example. The so-called ‘spirit of the game’ was, in reality, a Victorian creation in response to a game gone sour when match-fixing, bookmakers and betting dominated the game in the early 19th century. The day ended walking back to the hotel with Michael Holding, the great West Indian fast bowler, and wondering how a man so much older than me can still move with so much more grace.