The Surfer

The WICB should well and truly have learnt the lesson by now that these Aussie imports simply don't get the Caribbean culture, let alone understand one word of Jamaican patois or the Bajan twang.

They [audience figures]show that the three most watched programs on pay TV in Australia last week were cricket telecasts from India on Fox Sports. In order, these were the sixth and seventh one-dayers, and the one-off Twenty20 match.

A pay-TV audience is considered pretty good if it exceeds 100,000, given that only 29per cent of Australian households have access to the product. The matches in India all topped 100,000 and some did much better.

Howard is struggling to turn round ominous opinion polls, secure a fifth straight election victory and, most importantly, make sure he will still have the use of his personal RAAF plane to take him to and from the Boxing Day Test at the MCG (cost to the taxpayer last year a mere £5,700). He needs a distraction, a circuit-breaker such as the Tampa refugee crisis he exploited so successfully in the 2001 election. And at this desperate late stage there can be only one contender for the sports-mad PM: Muttiah Muralitharan.

By the consensus of his colleagues there is no doubt that the portly umpire from central New South Wales stands proud in the front rank of international umpires. His competence is unquestioned and he is well acquainted with the Laws of Cricket from Lord Cowdrey’s Preamble to the last full stop of Law 42. Hair can probably quote you chapter and verse from every regulation — forwards, backwards, sideways and upside down; every full-stop, comma, colon, semi-colon and each and every punctuation mark. But irrespective of his knowledge about the interpretation of cricket’s regulations, Hair may yet find himself handed the cold mitt, unless his translation of the game’s rules is not diluted by humility and a little give and take on his part.