Adil Najam
The news is too fresh, murky on the details, and still developing, but as Adnan Ahmed has just pointed out on the comments section of another post, Pakistan walked out of — and therefore possibly forfeited — the 4th Cricket Test against England at the Oval, in a dramatic turn of events. Then, it was announced that Pakistan will take the field… but just as the crowd begins to cheer, the umpires decide they will not come out if the Pakistan team does. Meanwhile the light keeps deteriorating. No matter how this ends, this will be a drama to remember.
More and developing details are available here. Best place to stay informed on this is CrickInfo.Com, from where the photograph above is are linked. (Updated after original posting).
Pakistan are well within their rights to protest in this manner. Darrel Hair has been associated with controversy with not only Pakistan, but Sri Lanka and India as well…seems a pretty racial bias to me.
However, the crux of the situation goes back to the actual allegation. There were a total of 26 cameras hovering around and capturing every breath of what was going on. Sky Sports even showed clips of Darrel Hair looking closely and following Mohammed Asif as he was shining the ball. The commentators brought up the point that Asif only looked to be polishing and that he was doing it out in the open in front of the umpire and making no effort to hide what he was doing.
I am extremely impressed by Inzamam. The latest update is (local pakistan time is 10:30pm) that ICC, ECB & PCB officials are meeting IMMEDIATELY meaning this must be taking place now to decide the outcome of the incident. The commentators are generally supportive of Pakistan which is difficult for me to believe since Botham is mildly supportive of Pakistan team because he is relying on video fottage that no enquiry was made by the umpires between 2:14pm when last wicket fell (3rd wicket) and 2:30 when the umpires changed the ball
OK folks, hopefully my last update on this for now. So, the news is that no more play today. Unclear if it will resume tomorrow. Meanwhile, I thought the statement from the English Cricket Board was also sensible (again, from CrickInfo):
This is from bbc. Sweet. No one could have handled it better.
1742: “We feel that there is no evidence whatsoever of deliberate scuffing of the ball. Once you accuse a team of deliberately tampering with the ball, it becomes a very big deal” Shaharyar Khan, PCB chairman
1741: More from Khan - “We felt we should make a protest, but we simply said that we would stay inside for a few minutes, and go out when the protest had been registered.”
1739: Quote from PCB chairman Shaharyar Khan: “We are still hopeful that the match can start again.”
Re. Adnan’s message. Shahrayar Khan is former diplomat (actually an alumni of where I teach), and head of the Pakistan Cricket Board. Here is what CrickInfo reported:
I think Shahrayar’s diplomatic background is helping a lot in this situation, which is changing by the minute. I liked his statements given to both cricinfo and bbc.
Its time to take Darrell Hair (a racist cheater) to task, we Pakistanis need to protest as loud as possible to call for the expulsion of Darrell Hair
With less than 20 minutes left to the game, it is now unlikely that play will happen today, on the 4th day, or at any point tomorrow (last day). Both the Pakistan team and the umpires are off the field. Here is a latest comment from CrickInfo.com a few minutes ago: