Sport - Cricket

Lehmann's racial abuse: Hearing today

ADELAIDE Jan. 17 The hearing into Darren Lehmann's admitted racial abuse aimed at Sri Lankan players will be held tomorrow morning at a hotel in his home town as his team mates begin practice.

By the time he joins them an hour later he will be banned for between four and eight one-day international matches and cricket discipline will have moved into a new era. Clive Lloyd, the match referee and a kindly man from West Indies where racial tolerance has only recently become a fact of life, will certainly take into consideration the apology Lehmann handed to the Sri Lankans in Brisbane on Wednesday night.

Earlier, as he admits, he shouted an offensive remark towards the Sri Lankan dressing room when he was run out as Australia headed for the victory which put it into the final of the VB one-day series.

The full remark has no place in a family newspaper but it contained the word "black'' and that is likely to result in Lehmann being given a sentence which will remind anyone who needs to have his memory jogged that racial abuse will not be tolerated.

Lloyd is unlikely to hand down the maximum ban but Malcolm Speed, the chief executive of ICC who insisted that Lehmann face charges — after Lloyd had dished out a reprimand and a warning about Lehmann's future conduct and the Australian Board announced that its player would be sent for counselling — has the right of appeal if he thinks the sentence is too lenient.

Tomorrow's hearing on the ground where Lehmann learnt his cricket as a teenager — between a rush to stardom in South Australian country cricket and followed by a spell with Victoria — will be brief.

Lloyd has already heard the evidence once but it promises to be a seminal moment for ICC, the world governing body which, under Speed's influence, is determined to stamp out racism.

It comes only 20 days before the start of the World Cup and for ICC to go easy on the race issue at such a time is unthinkable, especially as it is likely to raise its ugly head whenever games are played in Zimbabwe.

Lehmann is a generally popular, hail fellow well met character, known as Boof — because he had a bouffant hairstyle as a youngster — and agreeable whether he is leading South Australia at Adelaide Oval or Yorkshire in the county championship.

The county today issued a statement supporting him, despite its own problems with the racists on the Western Terrace where insults worse than Lehmann's fly at every Test.

These are sensitive times in Australia. Its tennis star, the Wimbledon champion Lleyton Hewitt, has been accused of a racial attack — but cleared by the American James Blake who was the subject of his remarks — and now Muttiah Muralitharan has joined the ranks of those who see racism everywhere in Australia.

The Sri Lankan off-spinner says fruit was thrown at him during that match in Brisbane — the capital of Queensland, a notorious State of redneck conservatives and appalling treatment for Aborigines — and that he may never play in the country again.

He claims spectators laughed when he was injured. "They should keep their mouths shut,'' he said. "I thought it might have been better this time but people still say things like `chucker'. That's not fair because I have been proved not to be. The crowd should realise that. If it's going to continue I might not come and play here any more. It's ok once or twice but it's been going on for seven years.''

It is not just Murali who has to put up with these insults from the crowd. The Barmy Army, the England support group, shouted "No ball'' every time Brett Lee bowled to the fury of his fellow Australian Jason Langer who called them ``overweight drunks.''

Several Test players have told me today that they feel Lehmann was unlucky, that what happens within a dressing room should be, as one put it "sacred'' and that the whole business reflects the growing Asian influence in world cricket.

All that may be true but it avoids the point that cricket ought to lead the way in crushing racial intolerance and that dealing in an open and forthright way with Lehmann will send out an unmistakable message.

Ted Corbett

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