Sunday, August 27, 2006
What goes around comes around! The 'Murali' curse that gobbled Hair!
The 'Murali' curse that gobbled Hair!
Iqbal Latif-
Below the caption "The way forward", Hair wrote: "I am prepared to retire/stand down/relinquish my position on the elite panel to take effect from 31st August 2006." He outlined his three conditions: a one-off payment of $500,000 to compensate for loss of future earnings over the next four years, with details to be kept confidential by both parties; a public explanation that retirement was a "lifestyle choice"; and no public comment to be made by the umpire.
Dickie Bird is entirely right when he said that with the emergence of the emails, this controversy snowballed into an issue bigger than the Body Line series of 1932 that led to the near severing of diplomatic and trade ties between Aussies and England. In The Times, Christopher Martin-Jenkins wrote that 'ICC's decision to publish Hair's offer plays into Pakistan hands' which implies that the emails should have been hidden. Indeed Malcolm Speed admitted that one of the differing opinions he received, one was also to erase the email, tear the letter and forget about it. The incident did not play in Pakistan's hand. What it actually did was to provide the final verdict on Hair, the character. A man who has business in mind when he takes his decisions. From Murali to the events at Oval, the controversies are created to make ground work for big money later. Hair's autobiography entitled 'The Decision Maker' made money brashly on the back of his unilateral decisions on calling Murali's bowling action "diabolical." Imagine a judge, after being turned down by the appellate bench, goes on to make money on his myopic view of his victim’s perceived fault.
Instead of offering a "one-off, non-negotiable" way out of the crisis, the question is why should Hair offer to resign and ask for money to do so? The revelation that the Australian official proposed walking away from the game in return for a secret deposit into his bank account has strengthened Pakistan's view that Hair was biased against them in the decisions that led to their forfeiture of the Fourth Test against England at the Oval. Hair appears to be a man under extreme pressure to make money, if nothing else. When the whole world was engaged in controlling the fall-out from his intransigence and pigheadedness last Tuesday, he had been busy writing the postscript of the saga quietly by making a blatant blackmailing attempt to get as much as possible out of the unfortunate incident. Hair was tired of umpiring. He was looking for a crisis; he made one up and he wanted to get the maximum out of it. Once he made money the proposition, Hair's case was finished. He has disgraced the institution. This is not the first time he has profited from his decisions. ICC looked the other way when he described Murali’s bowling action as 'diabolical' in a book that netted him lots of money. How can an arbitrator make money out of the cases he adjudicates? Imagine a Pakistani on an elite panel taking such liberties. These are the double standards ICC lives with. Is this a new definition of elastic justice? His love for money and cunning for creating controversy finally caught up with him.
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