Super Stars Involved In Legal Battle (13 Jul 1996)

13 July 1996

Super stars involved in legal battle

R Mohan

THREE great cricketers will be adversaries once again. But not on the field of play. They will be in the law court listening to arguments of learned counsel as the libel actions of Ian Botham and Allan Lamb against Imran Khan go to the Inner Temple. Irrespective of the verdict, not one of them will emerge the real winner.

It is likely that the lawyers will be the richer, by about half a million pounds (about Rs. 2.5 crores), as the legal system comes to grips with the knotty issue not only of cricket but also of social status, or of comments about it made by Imran Khan in magazine interviews in India and in Britain.

The libel actions, separately filed by Botham and Lamb but which are to be taken up together, will be heard from Monday, July 15. The best QC's will be in action as a much celebrated case comes to court, with Charles Gray representing Botham and Lamb and George Carman appearing on behalf of Imran Khan. The QCs and the firms of solicitors of Alan Herd and Howard Cohen, who will be battling for the opposite sides, are assured of fat fees while court costs could drag this cause celebre well beyond the half million pound mark.

Will the cricketers, squabbling thus in public, be any the wiser is the question. Reverse swing is not what lawyers like to argue about. Nor will wise judges consider themselves competent to comment on why a gouged ball swings differently from a normal ball. Yet, reverse swing brought on by ball tampering will be one of the main topics under scrutiny as the case is heard.

At the heart of the dispute is an interview first given by Imran to India Today in which he made disparaging comments about the social status and upbringing of Botham and Lamb. This was in retaliation to their accusations that the Pakistani fast bowlers were ``Ball Doctors''. The duo, who are fellow members of the cast in a chat show titled ``Beefy and Lamb in a Stew'', are offended at such comments from a representative of the distinctly upper class of Lahore.

While the normal procedure would have been to sue the newspapers and magazines which published the purportedly scurrilous stuff, the two former England players are suing Imran personally. Their case is, perhaps strengthened by the admission in his biography by Ivo Tennant that he (Imran) had tampered with the ball when playing for Sussex in the county championship 14 years ago.

Imran who married Sir James Goldsmith's daughter Jemima in a highly publicised society wedding in England last year might have to lean on his father-in-law's fortunes if the case were to go against him and he is asked to cough up costs. The figure being mentioned will not cause much of a dent in the millionaire's pocket from which millions are spent anyway in personal political pursuits.

Defeat will be hard to take in such a prominent legal battle. All three players may have been on losing sides at different times when they faced each other on the cricket field. Defeat is more easily lived down in cricket. It will come with a crunch in the court of law. The surrounding publicity is going to do no one any good, least of all Imran who has decided to pursue his own political ambitions back home in Pakistan. Imran's fellow fast bowler Sarfraz Nawaz had to beat a hasty retreat in an action he brought against Allan Lamb for alluding that he had gouged balls in order to make them reverse swing when he was a professional, ironically with Lamb's club, Northamptonshire CCC. The hearings were into a fourth day when Sarfraz withdrew. He knew he had no chance to contest the claim since evidence was built well up against him. The well known rabble rouser who may actually have been the high priest of the modern phenomenon of reverse swing which is attained by tampering with the ball would probably have been the last person to withdraw from such a contest. He may, however, have seen the writing on the wall and decided that discretion is the better part of valour.

Imran is unlikely to beat a retreat. He is too far committed to this potentially suicidal legal action because two years of wrangling have not brought the matter to a satisfactory conclusion. So much is tied up with the case now, including perhaps his political future. But then the all-rounder who was well known for making master moves in the chess-like game of cricket might even be able to invite sympathy with his people back home were he to lose in the legal action.

Imran could stoke the Pakistani sense of hurt; especially if he can project the Englishman as the tormentor. This can go down rather well in the former colonies which may not have shed the colonial yoke yet but which still are easily swayed by sentiment against their former masters. Imran is obviously determined to play the high-stakes game when he rakes up question about the class structure of British society. To suggest that Ian Botham whose father served in the Royal Air Force comes from low stock might be to stir a hornet's nest. But then Imran has never been above taunting the English cricket system and its players although he has often contradicted himself as a journalist when writing on county cricket in England and how the domestic system in Pakistan compares with it. No doubt arguments regarding all this are going to be very complicated.

The Pakistani tourists led by Wasim Akram are here already and doing well enough to provide a counterpoint to all this wrangling in court over the class structure, breeding and such rudiments of sociology. It is a pity all this should drag the fair name of cricket into it because, obviously, the game has little to do with it apart, of course, from providing the basis for the dispute which has to do with ball tampering.

The English have always been too self-righteous about any practice which may force them to be at the receiving end on the field. The defeat at the hands of Imran Khan's Pakistan in the World Cup final in 1992 may have been the actual cause of all this. It is well known that long before ball tampering by disfiguring it and altering its balance became prevalent, it was England's seamers who practised such things as using substances on the ball to make it swing.

The ``Vaseline'' case of 1976-77 involving the fast bowler John Lever who toured India under Tony Greig is a prominent incident in the game which would have been a watershed in its history if it had not been swept under the carpet in an era in which the media focus was not so intense. The ball in question, as used in the Madras Test, was actually tested at the King Institute Laboratory at Guindy but the results were kept a well guarded secret.

Mr. S. Sriraman, the BCCI secretary then, was of the view that nothing that happens on the field should be carried out of it. He was convinced that no cricket dispute should be taken to the court of law. In fact, as Secretary of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, he had a clause saying no dispute should be taken to court. Of course, such a clause was unconstitutional and had to be removed.

Things are rather more complicated these days. Cricketers like Botham, Lamb and Imran Khan are so rich they can afford to pursue such matters as honour in cricket in expensive law suits. As in cricket, one side is bound to lose. It won't be a pleasant feeling for the loser. The hearings are expected to last 10 days which means by the end of the month something should be known about which way the scales of justice would have swung in this cause celebre involving super stars of the game. Whatever be the result, the image of the game would somehow have taken a beating.

Source :: The Hindu