Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, I remember reading this article with a sense of disbelief and incredulity. Surely the big man jests, blithely stating ‘Yes, I am down to umpire in the Champions Trophy and I expect to fulfill that appointment.’ Imagine the arrogance in thinking one can get away with accusing teams without basis (in my humble opinion) of breaking the rules, acting outside of cricketing law and effectively blackmailing the ICC. The Aussie apologists of course are backing big Darrell all the way, ‘If he’s one of the best umpires in international cricket then of course he should be umpiring..’ so says that paragon of fair play Ponting. That’s a big fucking IF there old boy.

 

   One good decision…

  ..leads to another

Imagine if Assad Rauf or Aleem Dar did something similar to this, accusing say the English team of tampering to produce a ‘swinging’ victory in the Ashes, changing balls in the middle of a game that Australia was winning and trying to extort money in response for silence from the ICC. I’ll bet you my right ball that pretty much the whole of Australia’s and England’s cricketing fraternity would be baying for their blood, for them to be hung, drawn, quartered and then forced to watch Warne’s whale sex action tape (google it if you don’t know what I’m on about) as punishment. Any umpire from the Asian subcontinent if they did anything similar would probably be roundly reamed by the Aussies and would not be able to play even one bump cricket on the street.

I’m glad the Indian board has woken up and told Hair to bugger off and hopefully this will sound the death knell for his career. Given Hair’s history and blatant lying that he follows all the rules of cricket (ergo his inability to accept the ruling that Murali doesn’t throw), he is the one that should have the book thrown at him (preferably all the Brittanica volumes if I had my way) and charged with bringing the game into disrepute. I hope Hair gets buggered off the panel and not allowed to umpire anymore while the Pakistanis get absolved of tampering, Ranjan over to you….