Paul Lewis: Hair-brained e-mail loses credibility

This column started out to be a rigid defence of one of the fundaments of sport - the umpire's word is final. Then I read Darrell Hair's e-mails where he offered to resign if he was paid $US500,000.

The original column bemoaned the ridiculous over-reaction to the controversial umpire's ball-tampering allegation that sparked off a Pakistani strike and the forfeiture of the Oval test match to England this week. I suggested that the ICC might like to take all the combatants out the back and forcibly apply a cricket stump. The bottom line (pun intended) was that all sports administrators needed to reinforce that umpires control matches, not players. Then I read Darrell Hair's e-mails.

The column invoked the virus that has infested football - where one player gobbing off could be yellow-carded but 10 of them would not be but might intimidate and influence the ref. It complained of players like Wayne Rooney, Mr Angry Genius himself, threatening to withdraw from his England commercial obligations if the Football Association did not overturn his recent three-match ban. No matter how unjust the ban, players attempting to hold their game to ransom is ugly and showed how some sports have lost control of players at the cost of referees.

I ended up castigating the Pakistanis because, no matter the provocation, a strike was unforgiveable. They should have played on and taken up their beef with Hair through the appropriate channels. Then I read Hair's e-mail.

There can seldom have been, in sport, quite such an instant loss of credibility. Before Hair filed his barely believable e-mail, he still had his integrity and his competence as an umpire.

Pre-e-mail, Hair was widely recognised as a bit of a dictator; prone to applying the letter of the law when a soft hand and a discussion might yield better results. A man who knew the law and enforced it.

Post-e-mail, all that credibility disappeared faster than a Lance Cairns six.

What possessed the man? In answering that question, we can find the seeds of discontent that had been so upsetting the Pakistanis.

Hair's supporters, pre-e-mail, said their man was not biased, in spite of previous stories of brushes with teams from the sub-continent.

He was just a man who took the tough decisions and stood by them, they said.

But his e-mails raise the opportunity for his detractors to point to a man who was taking advantage of the "main chance". At best, it was a misjudgement. But what a misjudgement - one so poor that it casts a shadow over the judgements he is called to make as one of cricket's elite umpires.

Many criticised Hair at the Oval because he invoked the full letter of the law against Pakistan's alleged ball-tampering, allegations made without any evidence yet presented or seen. Hair could have used his discretion (all umpires have it), just changing the ball and pursuing the matter later. Now his judgement looks flawed and Hair a man of ego ahead of intelligence. The ICC are to be congratulated for defending Hair to the extent that CEO Malcolm Speed said he was in no doubt that Hair was not trying to make money. Speed also said he did not believe that the contents of Hair's e-mails had influenced his decisions at the Oval. But they could have been read as such - which was why the ICC went public.

Darrell Hair will likely never umpire another test match and it might just be, down the years, that his name becomes synonomous with really bad umpiring or refereeing decisions - as in: "Oh, the ref's having a shocker; he's having a Darrell."

How can a man be such a guardian of honour one minute that he brings a test match to a halt because he suspects one side has been tampering with the ball; the next minute, he seeks US$500,000 to make it all go away.

Still, at least Hair's e-mails have achieved something worthwhile. The unfortunate accompaniment to the Oval test was that there were Pakistanis allegedly involved in the foiled bombing plot against US and UK jet airliners. The implication was they were subject to the fundamentalists because of the emptiness of their lives in Britain.

Hair's brusque dismissal of the Pakistanis in the test took cricket out of the realms of sport and into the far nastier arena of national pride; riots; religion; racism and behaviour by the West against the East.

At least Darrell's darkest hour has let all the super-heated steam out of that particular balloon.

At least we have that to thank him for.