Cricket: Hair offers to go - for $0.5m

Doug Cowie

Doug Cowie, the former New Zealand test umpire and now International Cricket Council umpires manager was at the centre of the e-mail exchange which saw controversial umpire Darrell Hair offer to resign in exchange for US$500,000.

In a revelation which has shocked world cricket, Cowie was contacted by Hair who made his scarcely believable offer to resign.

Cowie immediately forwarded the e-mail to ICC chief executive Malcolm Speed, setting in place a process which has added further fuel to the fire created when Hair sparked off this week's forfeited test match between England and Pakistan by accusing the Pakistanis of ball tampering.

The Pakistanis staged a brief strike, after which the match was forfeited to England - triggering a sporting-racial-religious controversy which swept cricket.

But all that was swept aside when Hair made his staggering approach to Cowie.

Hair made the one-off, non-negotiable offer by e-mail on Tuesday, two days after the conclusion of the test match at the Oval, only to revoke it later in the day. It was sent to Cowie, who sent it on to Speed.

He contacted three lawyers, who advised the ICC to make the correspondence public because it would have been obliged to present it to the Pakistan Cricket Board before the code of conduct hearing in which Inzamam-ul-Haq, the Pakistan captain, is facing charges of ball tampering and bringing the game into disrepute after Pakistan delayed returning to the field after tea on Sunday in protest at Hair's ruling over ball tampering.

Withholding the contents of the e-mails from the PCB would have prejudiced the case against Inzamam and caused immeasurable damage to the ICC and the game of cricket if the truth ever came out. Releasing the contents of the correspondence to the PCB would have, in turn, increased the chances of the correspondence being leaked to the media and, with that in mind, the ICC went public.

Hair was already viewed as one the most controversial umpires in world cricket, having called Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan for throwing at the Boxing Day Test at Melbourne in 1995. His actions can be viewed in two ways. Some may consider that he engineered the situation for his financial gain, or tried to exploit an explosive predicament for similar reasons. The ICC, however, prefers to take the view that Hair, who has been under immense pressure since the weekend, was attempting to bring an untenable situation to a satisfactory conclusion without being out of pocket.

The $500,000 equates to approximately two years' salary for a top international umpire and is the amount he would potentially earn before his current contract with the ICC expires in March 2008.

The ICC has called a special executive meeting in Dubai on Saturday. Hair's future will be discussed, and it is impossible to believe he will officiate at an international match again.

Inzamam's code of conduct hearing will now take place in the second half of next month after the one-day series against England, which is now scheduled to go ahead.

Hair issued a statement: "There is now a communication from myself to the ICC in the public domain. This correspondence was composed after a very difficult time and was revoked my myself two days later after a period of serious consideration. There was no malicious intent behind this communication with the ICC.

"I am anxious that the code of conduct hearing takes place as soon as possible so these matters can be resolved and allow me to move on with my umpiring."

Speed said: "Darrell Hair has not been sacked, suspended or charged under the ICC code of conduct. But I did say to him that I could not guarantee that each of these positions would be maintained indefinitely.

"When I received the correspondence I was shocked. I thought it was a silly letter that signified that Darrell Hair was under a great deal of stress. I did not believe he saw it as an opportunity to make a sum of money.

"Although we are certain they are not the product of dishonest, underhand or malicious intent and believe the contents played no part in Darrell's decision making during the fourth Test," Speed added, "they could be read as such.

"The view of those of us at the ICC aware of these e-mails is that they were written by a man under a great deal of stress after an extremely difficult Test match."

David Richardson, the ICC's general manager of cricket, said: "When I saw the letters, I thought 'typical Darrell'.

"He believes 100 per cent that the decisions he made were correct and probably felt that if they are correct but they have a caused a furore 'maybe I can help the ICC by volunteering to resign, although, I'm not going to do that and miss out on the best years of my umpiring career, and clearly it would be fairer if I was paid for that'."

- THE INDEPENDENT