Hi Ho All,

I am ... well I don't know what. I don't know if this matters. I don't
know if this typifies the current state of the game and it's ruling
bodies. I don't know if this is a nail in the coffin of Test Cricket. I
don't know how bad this is, both now, as it happens, or in the years to
come as it is used as "but look at what they did in 2008 when ...".

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Maybe it's just the last straw
for me and my interest in international cricket and all that it stands
for. I sit here and ask myself "Christopher, why bother? Why spend your
days defending the wonder that is Test cricket when those who run the
game treat it with such contempt, and those who own the game let them?"
This is what I ask myself and I suspect it explains, although not in any
words I can think of, what I think of this.

For those of you lucky enough to still be ignorant of this ...
http://content-aus.cricinfo.com/ci-icc/content/story/359329.html

What I have put below is what The Times thought ...

Cheers
Christopher



 Sport the loser after ICC's history revision


   The decision to change the result of the 2006 Oval Test between
   Pakistan and England destroys the meaning of sport

Simon Barnes

/Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not
been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded
them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite
possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing
that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?/ —
*Ulysses*

It is clear that the International Cricket Council (ICC) has been
pondering long and fruitfully on this text from the great book.
Certainly, it 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.

He had deducted five runs from Pakistan because he had, you know, a sort
of feeling that they were tampering with the ball. The Pakistan team had
a bit of a grump during the tea interval and were late in coming back
out. Both teams were ready to carry on: the spectators were ready to
watch, the viewers were ready to view, the commentators were ready to
comment, the press were ready to write, but Hair was not ready to
umpire. So he called the game off and awarded it to England. Now the ICC
has, again, made it clear that he was wrong to do so.

Which is fair enough so far as it goes. But where does it stop? Perhaps
it should now award the 2005 Ashes series to Australia rather than
England. That's because the match at Edgbaston should have been won by
Australia. It finished when England at last ended the Australia tail's
extraordinary resistance and Michael Kasprowicz gloved a ball to the
wicketkeeper.

But subsequent examination of the slow-motion replay revealed that
Kasprowicz had taken his hand off the bat, and was therefore not out. So
he should have stayed in, and either he or Brett Lee knocked off the few
runs that Australia needed, and taken Australia to a 2-0 lead. Australia
therefore won the series 2-1.

Or take the famous joust between Allan Donald, of South Africa, and Mike
Atherton, then slumming it as England's opening batsman before he became
Chief Cricket Correspondent of this parish. In the course of that
fabulous passage of play, Atherton gloved one to the wicketkeeper. His
hand was on the bat. But it wasn't given, Atherton stood firm, England
went on to win. So perhaps this victory should also be reversed.

But why stop there? If the ICC has taken on Time itself, it should have
no problem in taking on a few sports outside its traditional remit.
Football, for example. Surely these shrewd judges from the ICC could not
hold the view that Geoff Hurst's second goal was legitimate? Perhaps a
specially appointed committee of cricketers would come up with the
conclusion that in the final of the World Cup of 1966, the ball did not
cross the line and, therefore, that the final should be awarded to West
Germany.

Then they could decide that Damon Hill, rather than Michael Schumacher,
won the Formula One driver's championship in 1994. Schumacher won after
he had driven into Hill, and that was clearly an illegal move. An
ancient wrong would thus be righted. And while they're at it, what about
the first bout between Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield? This was
bizarrely scored as a draw and, as such, it allowed Holyfield to keep
his world heavyweight title. So maybe that bit of history should be
changed as well.

There are, of course, times when results really have been changed in
retrospect. Ben Johnson won the gold medal in the 100 metres at the
Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988; the result was changed after Johnson
failed a drugs test and the race was awarded to Carl Lewis.

It has happened in horse racing, too. Tied Cottage hammered the lot of
them in the 1980 Cheltenham Gold Cup, winning by eight lengths, and lost
the race after he, too, failed a dope test. The race was then given to
Master Smudge, one of the least distinguished Gold Cup winners in history.

But why stop at sport? I am thinking of asking the ICC to change a few
results of my own. Perhaps they could reverse my sacking from the /South
China Morning Post/, which was a bad result for me and possibly — well,
maybe — an unfair one.

Or perhaps they could change the result of my encounter with the
delicious Shay Cunliffe and reverse her decision to dump me. At a
stroke, I could be living with her in Hollywood.

Well, as Stephen Dedalus muses in Ulysses, is what happens both
irretrievable and inevitable? Or is "what if" a legitimate question? Is
it really acceptable to play fast and loose with history? Could the
French reverse the result of Agincourt, the Scots reverse Culloden, the
Germans reverse the Battle of Britain?

Clearly not. So why do it in sport? Anyone would think that sport was
trivial, or something. And that would never do. The thing about sport is
that we have to pretend it's serious. And if we make the admission that
it isn't, it becomes pointless.

The history of sport is supposed to look like serious history: such
matters as the Ashes, the men's singles at Wimbledon and the England
football team have a resonance because of their history. The present
Wimbledon is alight with the prospect that Roger Federer could beat
Bjorn Borg's record of five successive men's singles titles.

But what if we decided that there was something amiss with that last
final that Borg won? What if we decided that after John McEnroe had won
the greatest tie-break in history, he should have gone on to win the
match? Then not only would Federer's march on history suddenly become
irrelevant, so would just about everything else in tennis as well.

History is full of injustices, errors, things that could have been done
better, things that can never be put right. That is what history means,
as Stephen muses as he teaches history to his pupils at school.

And sport has its resonance with us because it mimics history. It mimics
the affairs of men and women, that is why it acts as a thrilling
metaphor for all the passions and purposes of human life. If we go back
and start putting right all the wrong things that have happened, we are
saying that, since sport is amenable to this kind of alteration, it
isn't really history. In short, it isn't really real. And as soon as we
see through sport, sport loses its value for us.

The ICC has shattered the illusion on which sport is built. Perhaps it
should go back and change it.



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