At some point in every great Western, a steely eyed lawman with a straight flush grabs the wrist of a cheroot-chomping varmint and accuses him of cheatin’. A brief exchange of nostril-flaring ensues, giving the pianola player time to slink off his stool and take shelter behind the bar; but the silence is short-lived: the varmint invariably goes for his Peacemaker, and before you can say ”Little Big Horn”, every low-down coyote in the place is throwing chairs, swinging bottles, shooting the pianola and falling through balsa-flimsy balustrades.
The archetypal Western bar brawl is curious for its wanton pointlessness: everybody slugs everybody else with considerable vigour, and yet very few seem to know — or care — what the circumstances of the original disagreement were. It’s as if there are two default states — placid chaw-mastication, and wholesale butt-kicking — separated by nothing but a couple of seconds. Evidence, contemplation and objective analysis simply don’t exist in the saloon bust-up.
Apparently they aren’t that big in cricket circles, either. As England and Pakistan flung bourbon bottles at each other, and Sri Lanka dropped all pretence of diplomacy and called South Africa yellow, one had to marvel at just how quickly and thoroughly a sport can be tarred and feathered by politics. It took well over two years for the loonies in charge of Zimbabwe to shame that country’s cricket. In England, mother of liberal democracy and father of clear-eyed justice, it took about 45 minutes.
At the time of writing, on Wednesday evening, no new evidence had presented itself in the ball-tampering mess. We still only had footage of Darrell Hair’s giant mitts poking at an ordinary-looking ball.
We still weren’t clear about when and why — or even if — Duncan Fletcher had gone to visit match referee Mike Procter. We still wondered why Inzamam-ul-Haq had played musical chairs in the dressing room, leading his team back onto the field after having taken a stand by staying inside minutes earlier.
In other words, all that is certain is that an allegation has been made by lantern-jawed ”Hang ’em High” Hair. And yet the volume — in both senses of the word — of the vitriol slung at each other by Anglo and Asian pundits would suggest a fait accompli, hours of super-slowmo close-up footage, clear statements by captains and match referee.
Waqar Younis’s conviction for ball-tampering in 2000 was such a case, in which the firestorm of comment at least centred on something tangible. But this week was nothing but a bar brawl.
It got pretty silly, at times, and perhaps it’s best, for the sake of reputations and tempers, that one grant intellectual amnesty to the dozens who said or wrote spectacularly stupid things. Imran Khan, for example, who declared Hair to be a ”mini-Hitler”, apparently confirming the view of his many critics in Pakistan and abroad that the small funicular that connects his brain to his mouth has derailed.
And of course there was Steve Waugh, whose contribution was to insist that Hair ”always stands by what he believes, so you can’t ask much more from an umpire”. And there we were still thinking the umpires’ only job was to get things right, and not let their beliefs over-ride their observations.
In the end it’s best to draw a veil over all this pianola-shooting. The provocations that triggered it have nothing to do with ball-tampering and everything to do with the hardening perceptions East and West have of one another; and none of those is useful or relevant right now. For now, all must be quietly investigated, and reputations must be cleared, or punishments dished out. More importantly, the question of ball-tampering must be deracialised, and the best way to do that is to legalise it.
The likes of Bob Woolmer and Angus Fraser have written eloquently in support of this idea, and their point is extremely well made. What bat-makers are doing to modern bats — feather-light pick-up, ludicrous sweet-spots — is the equivalent of stapling ram-jets and dynamite to balls. Of all the nasty things cricketers do, lifting some leather by a few millimetres in order to strangle an inch of lateral movement out of a lifeless pitch seems fairly benign, and not a little skilful.
Less skilful, unfortunately, have been the pronouncements of the Sri Lankan cricket authorities and their surprise ally, new International Cricket Council chief Percy Sonn.
It was inevitable that a News24 poll would reveal majority support for the idea that the Proteas were ”sissies” for abandoning their tour; but it was somewhat alarming that Sonn should take an equally admonishing view.
No doubt the ”disappointment” he felt over their evacuation had nothing in common with the macho fantasies of white South Africa and was focused more on the fiscal politics of cricket; nonetheless it was a timely reminder of how comfortable hindsight is.
Had someone, say Makhaya Ntini, lost an arm during an evening stroll through a Colombo shopping mall, Sonn would probably have been disappointed in someone else. Apparently the target of one’s patronising disappointment depends entirely on the scheduling whims of terrorists. One lives and learns.