The hearing of Inzamam has been delayed till the end of September. You would think that the ICC would want to resolve this matter as soon as possible as they were serious regarding the ball tampering issue. The ICC is more concerned that the one dayers at hand are played without controversy and the revenues from the tournament are not risked rather than taking bold steps. They prefer that the matter is cooled off and away from the public eye so that they can take their normal toothless approach of doing nothing.

One thing the ICC was pretty active in was to bring in Ranjan Madugalle for the hearings in place of the match referre for the controversial match, Mike Procter. Even if Mike Procter was a part of hearing the points of the Pakistan cricket or it’s management (Woolmer) or Darrel Hair, would that mean Procter is no longer a neutral? Procter was the match referee and he should have been in the middle of the decisions. The reason that the ICC now gives to postpone the hearing of Inzamam - illness in Madugalle’s family is hilarious and unbelievable. They could replace Procter in a jiffy so why not replace Madugalle in a jiffy as well now?

What to make out of the whole issue? Depending on which country you are in or which local newspaper you subscribe to, you can get views on the issue from every one from Steve Waugh to Javed Miandad to Dilip Vengsarkar to the cricket superstar of your block. I still do not believe so much has happened over nothing really. Had Pakistan accepted to let the 5 points go off their records, won the match and then protested over the verdict, not only would they have won the match, we would have been spared of a lot of nonsense.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Cricket. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.