Hair returns from exile to find a game uneasy with authority figures

When the Connecticut Yankee introduced baseball to King Arthur's court, he had fearful problems finding a referee. "The umpire's first decision was usually his last; they broke him in two with a bat, and his friends toted him home on a shutter. When it was noticed that no umpire ever survived a game, umpiring got to be unpopular."

Mark Twain's solution was to appoint someone "whose rank and lofty position under the government" would preserve him. Sadly, those who administer cricket – purportedly the most chivalrous of games – seem too feeble to secure their agents even against more insidious forms of indiscipline.

True, Darrell Hair would doubtless benefit by absorbing something of the institutional expediency of the International Cricket Council. But few here yesterday missed the note of compassion in the applause that greeted his emergence into a morning of Manchester grey. For if the saga of the past 21 months has disclosed the worst of this stony, obstinate figure, then it hardly brought out the best in his masters.

It began here in England, when Pakistan declined to play after Hair awarded a five-run penalty for tampering with the ball. That melodrama spawned many others: the ICC professed to have lost confidence in Hair, and exiled him from the Test circuit. Hair resorted to an employment tribunal, alleging racial discrimination. Yet here he was, back in a Test match.

Even Hair, surely, could not have been immune to a tremor of uncertainty when Ryan Sidebottom spun round in the fifth over and implored him to pronounce Jamie How lbw. He demurred, and Hawkeye showed the ball slithering millimetres over the bails.

That is what Hair is there for, of course – to make decisions that do not fall too short of the exorbitant standards of television analysis. Or, rather, that is one of the things he is there for. He is a classic authority figure, ponderous and solid. But his authority lacks dimensions, lacks subtlety. These teams, at least, trust his eye, but decision-making and judgement are very different things. Anyone sensitive to the game's interests would surely have found less incendiary ways to address his concerns than calling the young Muttiah Muralitharan for throwing in a Test, or plunging for the nuclear option with Inzamam-ul-Haq at The Oval.

Hair has apparently endured a course in communication. Perhaps the benefits were evident in his chat with Stuart Broad when he repeatedly followed through to How's toecaps; perhaps not. Melancholy duties with the light meter aside, Hair made an agreeably muted return.

He apparently remains reviled in the subcontinent, and it is safe to assume that he will not stand in any Pakistan matches before the end of his contract. But his ostracism in the powerbase of the modern sport makes his accommodation here as ambiguous as the faintest of edges behind.

In the final Test of this series, at Trent Bridge, Hair will stand alongside Steve Bucknor, himself poorly treated by his employers during the winter – once again at the behest of the same satraps whose hunger for a fast rupee is opening such deep fissures elsewhere in the game. In terms of interest, investment and dynamism, India has obvious rights in modern cricket. But privileges bring responsibility. Perhaps the appointment yesterday of Vince van der Bijl to oversee umpiring for the ICC will reinforce standards and respect.

While Hair and Bucknor will not be carried from Nottingham on a shutter, it would be understandable if their recent example had a similar effect on recruitment.

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