Benaud gets the balance right

There are times when the International Cricket Council deserves nothing so much as a smack around the head. The ICC's handling of the Gibbs saga was not one of those times.

Of course, the suits can't be expected to get everything right, and there was some messiness in the form of Gibbs' ban being tweaked to include a Twenty20 game in the guise of a one-day international.

But the dismissal of his appeal should engender confidence in all who care about the game - and about its place in the modern world - that the ICC is capable of making the right decision on important matters.

Might Gibbs have appealed at all had his offence not fallen under level three of the code of conduct, which brought race into the equation? Part of this regulation governs "any language or gestures that offends, insults, humiliates, intimidates, threatens, disparages or vilifies another person on the basis of that person's race, religion, colour, descent or national or ethic origin".

Quite how Gibbs and his representatives came to the opinion that calling Pakistani supporters a "fucking bunch of fucking animals" and telling them to "fuck off back to the zoo" was not a violation of the above would surely boggle greater minds than mine.

Richie Benaud saw matters differently to Gibbs and the original charges stuck. Just as importantly, Benaud took pains not to brand Gibbs a racist. Which would seem to mean that it was Gibbs' crime - and not Gibbs himself - that was the target of the action the ICC took.

Semantics? Not if you have, as Benaud would seem to do, an understanding of South Africa's murky race politics. For a start, some South Africans would describe Gibbs as black. Others would call him coloured, which is probably what he calls himself.

Still others will label him a Khoisan, and another bunch will refuse to classify him. The truly weird will refer to Gibbs as a so-called coloured, and make little quotation marks in the air with their index fingers as they do so.

But Gibbs' race is irrelevant in all this. It's the race of the target of his words that matters, and they were plainly Asian or of Asian descent.

In those terms, who can be surprised that Gibbs' epithets pushed all the wrong buttons of the people who heard them when they were broadcast live courtesy of the stump microphones?

Speaking of which, Benaud, of course, has an intimate knowledge of cricketing life on both sides of the mike. "If you do not use the words they do not get to air," was his bulletproof advice. If this needs reinforcement, and it shouldn't, here it is: the stump mike did not say anything, Herschelle Gibbs did.

Take a bow, Mr Benaud. Not forgetting Chris Broad, the match referee whose findings were vindicated. Amazing, isn't it, what a couple of sensible blokes can achieve.