Justice: Denness the menace style!

By Nirmal Shekar

CHENNAI, NOV.20Mike Denness is an honourable man. Those who know him from the days when he played in India would certainly vouch for this. For, those were days when Mr.Denness's heightened sense of fairness was so obvious that he never even argued with his bat - choosing instead, to start his trek back to the pavilion the moment Bishan Singh Bedi or B.S.Chandrasekar picked up the ball!

After all, Denness is English. And he was a cricketer. Which automatically makes him a gentleman, his integrity beyond question, his sense of fairplay beyond doubt.

The only problem is, Mr.Denness's sense of ``fairness'' dates back to the Victorian era when Britannia ruled the waves.

In the event, Denness truly believes - in the manner of his forefathers who ruled this land with such cunning for so long - that there are always two sets of rules, or, in the least, two different interpretations of the same set of rules.

And it was with a mind-set rooted deeply in Victorian times that Denness chose to judge events at the second Test match between India and South Africa at Port Elizabeth from his lofty perch as the ICC Match Referee.

Six Indian cricketers - including the man who is inarguably the most gifted active cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar - were handed out punishment as Denness, like a no-nonsense headmaster from Eton, whipped out the cane.

Tendulkar was accused of tampering with the ball while four others - Virendra Sehwag, Shiv Sundar Das, Harbhajan Singh and Deep Dasgupta - were found guilty of the crime of excessive appealing. Sourav Ganguly was penalised for not keeping his players in check.

Give it to the brats! Put them in their place! Of course, the English headmaster sought to do just this. And in his way, Denness was very fair. He judged them by the interpretation reserved for Indians.

This is precisely the reason why you cannot ask Denness why he did not use the same yardstick to judge Shaun Pollock or Jacques Kallis or Nanty Hayward. They aren't Indians, after all.

For some people, like Mr.Denness, things haven't changed in a long, long time. Nothing has changed since the days when the sun never set on the British Empire.

But the problem is, even those of us who know that everything has changed sit unmoved during such times, letting men caught up in a time-warp get away with murder, so to say.

That is the problem, precisely, when it comes to the latest incidents in Port Elizabeth which once again underscore the fact that all cricketers are equal but some are more equal than the others...and that even the greatest active cricketer on the planet, Tendulkar, is less equal than the others!

That Denness took action based on evidence offered by a television channel covering the Test - and not on any written report from the umpires out in the middle or even from the rival captain or team management - makes it all the more outrageous.

To be sure, there is no attempt here to turn the Indian players into angels. There are no angels in modern professional sport where there is so much at stake.

Nor is this column aimed at making any sort of claim to heroism on the part of some of the most over-rated, over-hyped and over- paid sportsmen in the history of Indian sport.

But, the point is, for some time now, Indian cricketers have been singled out for rough treatment by match referees and the body that is expected to speak up for their cause - the Board of Control for Cricket in India - has done scarcely anything about it.

If the BCCI doesn't speak up for cricketers who represent the country, then who will do it? How can a match referee ban a player - Sehwag - from playing in a Test match for excessive appealing without, in the first place, warning the young man? What sort of justice is this?

It is all very well to talk about upholding the spirit of the game. But there has to be some sort of uniform norm vis-a- vis judging the players for any kind of breach. Justice must not only be done but it must be seen to be done.

More than this, the fact is, the spiritual home of cricket has long since moved from the village greens of England to the dusty lanes and bylanes of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Yet, the old colonial system under which the game is governed, still seems to hold firm.

If things go on for too long as they have, then cracks will certainly begin to appear in the fragile United World of Cricket. And this is certainly not good for a sport that is played only by a handful of nations.

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