In defence of honour and dignity

Pakistan's cricketers made a big mistake on Sunday at The Oval in London. Having refused to take the field immediately after tea in the aftermath of umpire Darrell Hair's decision that the ball had been illegally tampered with by the tourists, Inzamam-ul-Haq and his men should have abandoned the fourth and final Test against England then and there.

But by belatedly emerging from the dressing-room some 45 minutes later, at a time when Hair and Billy Doctrove had already ruled that England were the winners by virtue of their opponents' forfeiture, they had significantly weakened their own principled position, ultimately succumbing to pressure from within or without that playing a cricket match, and more than likely going on to win it on the final day, was more important than dignity and integrity.

If the Pakistanis were really serious with all of the post-match comments about their country's honour being at stake, they should have boarded the team coach back to their hotel and left the officials to wonder what to do next. Being vilified in the British press or roundly booed by thousand of blind loyalists is a very small price to pay for making an emphatic statement that enough is well and truly enough.

What is it about us former colonials that we feel compelled to measure ourselves by our one-time masters' yardstick of what constitutes civility and fair play? Giving up a Test match is as legitimate a protest as any other, especially if the degree of the perceived offence goes beyond issues of umpiring incompetence, or even bias. Those strident defenders of Victorian values, who will tut-tut and mutter disapprovingly about such behaviour being just not cricket, need to come to terms with the reality that this is only a game, and if it means being disrespected and insulted - as the Pakistanis claim - then it isn't a game worth playing.

It is of course not unprecedented for a team to threaten to abandon a Test. The all-powerful West Indies side came extremely close to walking out on the second match of the turbulent 1979-80 series in New Zealand, so incensed were they at what are generally accepted to be a litany of blatantly biased umpiring decisions against them (I say that on the basis of not just having read about that tour, but listening to the comments of those who saw it "live" or were actually involved during the West Indies trip there earlier this year).

Unlike Pakistan, Clive Lloyd's team eventually took the field after a similarly prolonged tea interval before it was too late. Everything continued as before: the bad decisions, the West Indian complaints, the New Zealand rebuttals about poor sportsmanship. The chance to make an attention-getting statement had been lost.

Would it have made any significant difference to the future course of the game if the West Indians had walked out in the middle of the match more than 26 years ago? More than likely not, just as you would usually say that this latest raging controversy will probably run its swift course before it's back to regular programming, courtesy of some creative negotiating, all for the sake of ensuring that the lucrative global business of cricket is not significantly interrupted.

But the conciliatory mood might just be changing, especially as this latest issue comes in the midst of allegations of terrorist plots and a deepening mistrust between two distinct cultures. Will the players rally behind Inzamam and refuse to play in the scheduled limited-over series against England if he is slapped with a ban at Friday's hearing for his team's ball-tampering and then bringing the game into disrepute?

There seems to be no easy way out this time, especially as the umpires have clearly drawn the line in the sand by first penalising Pakistan on the field and then apparently standing by the decision that the match was over as far as they were concerned when the visitors chose to stay in the dressing-room immediately after tea.

On the evidence of those two issues alone, Inzamam is guilty, and if the International Cricket Council is consistent in applying its Code of Conduct, then some sort of ban is inevitable.

What this matter has also highlighted is the continued polarisation of the traditional cricket establishment and the increasingly assertive and aggressive nations of the Indian subcontinent, never mind the best public relations efforts of the ICC.

While Hair is being mocked and ridiculed in the streets of Karachi and Lahore, across in his native Australia, he is being hailed in the media as forthright and courageous. Not for the first time, there is no definitive border between right and wrong, especially as that line is so often blurred by the perceptions of different people conditioned by the mores and standards of very different societies.

In the modern era of sport, of course, the common denominator is not fair play, but money, and while Pakistan will complain long and often about being insulted and humiliated yet again, they will also be made aware of the severe financial consequences of failing to fulfill their contractual obligations should the heavy hand of cricketing law come down on Inzamam in two days' time.

What price, if any, will they determine is too high to pay in defence of their honour and dignity?