Hair adamant he did nothing wrong in abandoned Test
SYDNEY: Banished Australian umpire Darrell Hair said yesterday he had correctly handled last year's abandoned cricket Test between England and Pakistan, which became the first in history to be won by forfeit.
Hair and fellow umpire, West Indian Billy Doctrove, ruled Pakistan had forfeited the match when then-Pakistan captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq refused to play on after the umpires penalized his side for alleged ball tampering.
Hair, who was later barred from officiating Test matches, has since finished a man-management course he agreed to as part of a "rehabilitation" program.
He agreed to the course when he withdrew a racial discrimination claim against his employers, the International Cricket Council (ICC). The claim stemmed from an explosive confrontation with Inzamam during the Oval Test.
"It's easy to say, look, if I'd known how to deal with that sort of issue, the communication and management issues then, if I knew then what I know now I may have done things differently," Hair said.
"But I don't believe so because there's a certain limit to what the umpire needs to do under those circumstances and I believe that both the umpires fulfilled those obligations both with the ball tampering and the refusal to play."
Hair was answering questions from presenters and callers on a Sydney radio station yesterday.
"A lot of people have said to me you must be really annoyed with cricket and the fact is I'm not annoyed with cricket, it's just a couple of people made a strange decision to remove me from umpiring."
The ICC will decide next March whether the 55-year-old umpire can return to top-level umpiring.
Hair is hopeful he will be reinstated and said he would be ready to umpire in Pakistan if chosen to do so.
"If that's what my contract says and they want me to umpire any Test match, well, that's what we're there for," he said.
But Pakistan cricket remains convinced that Hair is unfit to umpire at the international level.
"At the moment, the PCB's position is that Hair is unfit to officiate in the elite panel and it's up to the ICC to revisit the stance on him," Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chairman Nasim Ashraf said last month.
"We do not have any dispute with Hair and there is no personal thing, but on our judgment he failed at The Oval."
AFP
(China Daily 11/22/2007 page23)
