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).
Just saw this on a different blog and thought it was pertinent:
Simon Barnes writes at TimesOnline:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,426-232189 2,00.html
“Pakistan were not accused of ball-tampering yesterday. They were judged and found guilty by the umpire, Darrell Hair, as they sought to halt England’s second-innings resurgence. This is a profoundly serious business in cricketing terms. It is not like calling a woman a tease. It is like calling her a whore. Well, there are women who are whores, but you’d better be bloody sure of your facts before making the accusation.
It’s not the legality of her actions you are calling into question, but the morality. Pakistan were punished not for breaking the law but for — as cricketing people see it — attempting to subvert the higher morality of sport and human conduct. No wonder there is a fair amount of distress.”
I, at least, will not take the pop psychology and analysis too seriously. Sticking to cricket, the precedents here aer troublesome. What will it mean for future umpiring disputes? The ball tampering decision, everyone seems to think, was a bad one and maybe a malicious one. Also, it is without precedent. So, in the process of how it was taken (without due diligence) it sets a dangerous precedent. Also, there is the precedent that when a team objects strongly against an umpire in the middle of a game (SA v Ind 2001) the game is stripped of Test status. This also fits in with a bigger politics against south Asian teams… with the triangular series in Sri Lenka just cancelled. Umpiring disputes are not new, they go back a long way and all teams have had their fill (Australians especially). Here the big failure was of this whole idea of the match referee… was’nt the whole point of that to make sure suich thinsg don’t happen!
Ramesh, good point. The outcome of the match was irrelevant in that situation. It was prudent to wait till the break and confirm if the report had been filed with the referee and then stage a protest. If there ever was a case for a walkout it was here. Even the manner in which it took place was right. Again I think Sheheryar’s pesence was a huge plus, else it would have been a typical pakistani affair..doing either too much or timidly doing too little. As for teh results how many of you remember the winning margin from the 92 series;.. was it 2-0 or 1-0? And how many of you remember that waqar and akram were accused of ball tempering and that Aqib had an incident with the umpire on bouncers in that series? See results in such situations do not matter..
I would like to take a different approach to explain what happened at the Oval. For a country like Pakistan, these are trying times. And when you play cricket in a country against which some of your own citizens are accused of trying to kill and many accused of killing innocent Britishers in the London bombing, one can imagine the charged nature of the atmosphere on the field. Even otherwise, Pakistani players are not particularly known for their sportsmanship like behavior on the field.
It is what Akbar Ahmed calls the ‘post honour’ world and I would like to explain some of the reaction coming from the Pakistani team, Pakistan public, commentators, PCB and even Musharraf from that light. Essentially, what the Pakistanis were saying is that, it is already an insult when you label us ‘terrorists’ and on top of that, you are now accusing us of being cheaters! Look, we have self respect and we will not take this lightly and honour needs to be restored. In the context of the sub continent, this explanation makes sense, because for Indians and Pakistanis, honour is the essence of life. Take it away and you take away our inner soul. Adil, any comments?
jyoti, you have a valid point. But we are desis and our manners of protest are stranger. We are like this only :)
Quote from BBC
“And in his regular cricket column, the former Pakistani captain, Imran Khan, made perhaps the most ferocious comment: “Hair is one of those characters” he writes, “when he wears the white umpire’s coat, he metamorphoses into a mini-Hitler.”
I find this statement so funny. Imran can be brutally honest at the expense of being politically incorrect :)