Darrell Hair’s legal action against the ICC claiming racial discrimination reached the end of the first week in London with some remarkable claims by Ray Mali, the ICC’s interim president. But it has also exposed the ICC’s hierarchy and the media has not been overly impressed with what has been seen.
Simon Wilde in The Sunday Times says that Friday was the ICC’s bad hair day:
Malcolm Speed must be offering up a silent prayer of thanks that next year he is getting out of the surreal world of cricket administration after the mauling the ICC has taken at the London Employment Tribunal …
Whatever the outcome, the case has highlighted serious issues for the wider game of cricket. First, the ICC needs to be run by a smaller executive with powers to act decisively and swiftly without recourse to an unwieldy and politically hamstrung executive board. And officials need training in sports administration.
Former England captain Michael Atherton uses his Sunday Telegraph column to put forward similar opinions:
If the ICC have many more disastrous days, such as they endured on Friday – the start of, in David Cameron-speak, 'The Great Darrell Hair Fight-Back' – it might be a seminal moment for the future of the administration of the game.
It was the turn of three of the ICC directors – Sir John Anderson (New Zealand), Inderjit Singh Bindra (India) and Ray Mali (then the South African director, now the president) – to face cross-examination by Hair's lawyer, Robert Griffiths QC. What a time of it Griffiths had! Turning to the gallery with a malevolent grin every time a point was scored, he revealed completely the vacuum of leadership at the heart of the organisation that purports to run the game.
One by one these well-meaning, certainly not racist but undoubtedly bumbling and, on this evidence, incompetent administrators shuffled to the front of the room, raised their right hands and promised to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. One by one they were sent packing, lacerated from head to foot by Griffiths's ordered mind and razor tongue.
