Hair defends Oval actions

Darrell Hair has defended his handling of the abandoned Test at The Oval between England and Pakistan in August 2006. The actions led to Hair being suspended from standing in Tests and resulted in him taking the ICC to an employment tribunal in London last month before he withdrew his claims of racial discrimination.

Hair and fellow umpire Billy Doctrove ruled Pakistan had forfeited the match when Inzamam-ul-Haq refused to play on after the umpires penalised his side for alleged ball tampering. It was the first Test in history to end in such fashion.

Hair, who was later barred from officiating Test matches, has since finished a man management course he agreed to as part of a "rehabilitation" programme. He agreed to the course when he withdrew his racial discrimination during the second week of the hearing in London. The claim stemmed from an explosive confrontation with Inzamam during the Oval Test.

"It's easy to say, look, if I'd known how to deal with that sort of issue, the communication and management issues then, if I knew then what I know now I may have done things differently," Hair said on a Sydney radio station where he was answering questions from presenters and callers.

"But I don't believe so because there's a certain limit to what the umpire needs to do under those circumstances and I believe that both the umpires fulfilled those obligations both with the ball tampering and the refusal to play.

"A lot of people have said to me you must be really annoyed with cricket and the fact is I'm not annoyed with cricket. It's just a couple of people made a strange decision to remove me from umpiring."

The ICC will decide next March whether Hair can return to top-level umpiring. He is hopeful of being reinstated and said he would be ready to umpire in Pakistan if chosen to do so.

"If that's what my contract says and they want me to umpire any Test match well that's what we're there for."

However, Pakistan remains convinced that Hair is unfit to umpire at international level. "At the moment the PCB's position is that Hair is unfit to officiate in the elite panel and it's up to the ICC to revisit the stance on him," PCB chairman Nasim Ashraf said last month. "We do not have any dispute with Hair and there is no personal thing but on our judgement he failed at The Oval."