A bad precedent

Simon Barnes, in the Times, criticises the ICC for changing the status of the controversial Oval Test in 2006 from that of a forfeited match to a draw.

Certainly, it [the ICC] has decided that history can be undone and put together again in a new form. In a strange, and rather disturbing, precedent, it has said that the match between England and Pakistan at the Brit Oval in 2006 was not, after all, a win for England. It was a draw.

Julius Caesar lives, Pyrrhus survives and the history of the world is thereby changed for ever. It’s a bizarre business, the more so because on one level, the ICC seems to have got it right. That match in question ended when Darrell Hair, acting on a half-baked hunch and an overcooked sense of his own importance, called the match off.