James Lawton: Cricket's darkest hour

England Test farce over ball-tampering claim is symptom of a wider malaise afflicting sport

A Test match died at the Oval yesterday for a lack of trust between those who play cricket and those who administer it, but for those who simply watched, with equal disbelief and dismay, a much wider question was provoked by the cheating dispute between the Pakistan team and one of the game's senior umpires, the Australian Darrell Hair.

It asked if the collapse of a single match, shocking enough in itself, was not simply another pitiable example of a wider death throe.

Were we seeing still another blind march to the point where the very meaning of sport falls into the most painful of ridicule? As the chairman of the English and Pakistan cricket boards fought desperately for a compromise which might rescue, if not the final Test, a lucrative one-day series, as a tide of boos rolled down from the terracing of the famous old ground which just a year ago was enchanted by seeing England regain the Ashes, those simmering questions inevitably gathered still more force.

This weekend it seemed that the start of a new Premiership season carried most threat to sporting values which have been so relentlessly undermined this disquieting summer.

Endemic diving and steadily eroding discipline in football is seen as a huge threat to the popularity of a billion pound-plus industry - a fear encapsulated in the fact that the most brilliant young player in the English game, Wayne Rooney, a two-goal hero for Manchester United yesterday, is about to start a three- match suspension for a red card received less than a month after he was ejected from England's most vital game in the World Cup.

But such concerns were enveloped in the crisis that overwhelmed the Oval yesterday. If a Test match could suddenly become so completely unhinged as it did when, without warning, Hair in effect announced that the Pakistanis were cheating by tampering with the ball, where were the limits to the disintegration of classic sports values? Perhaps the idea that cricket was sacrosanct was quaintly anachronistic - the old empire was once threatened by the Bodyline series when Sir Don Bradman was targeted by English bowlers and charges against Pakistan bowlers are not not new - but it was the speed and the chaos of the Oval denouement that went to the heart of fears about sport as we like to think we have known it.

The Pakistani captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, a fiercely proud character, later said that he was merely protesting against the arbitrary branding of his team as cheats by Hair, an Australian official deeply unpopular in Pakistan, but by then there was a sense that cricket had been swept into a crisis that would bring wounds not easily healed.

For the wider image of sport the timing could scarcely have been more disastrous on a weekend when Marion Jones, the American sprinter who six years ago was hailed as the superwoman of the track, was reported to have tested positive.

Track and field has long operated under the darkest of clouds but Jones was said to be intent on redeeming her sport, one which was besmirched again last weekend when Darren Campbell, a member of the gold-medal-winning British sprint relay team at the European Championships in Gothenberg, refused to take a lap of honour with his team-mate Dwain Chambers, who was banned for using drugs. That controversy was fuelled further by suggestions that Linford Christie, the Olympic gold winner who finished his career under a suspension for testing positive for nandrolone, would be the mentor of the nation's young sprinters.

The list of disillusionments scarcely needed to be augmented by the final days of a Test series which had featured some outstanding performances.

Last month the Tour de France stripped the yellow jersey from American winner Floyd Landis. He swears he will prove himself innocent of doping, but the cynicism of his sport has become a lurid joke.

Most disastrous of all was the collapse of fair play in the World Cup in Germany in June and July. The most watched sports event of all time produced passages of brilliant play and was then consumed by a spate of diving. Thierry Henry, the hero of Arsenal and France, was caught in a gut-wrenching dive to win a crucial free-kick and then there was the ultimate horror... the great Zinedine Zidane head-butting Italian rival Marco Materazzi in the World Cup final in Berlin.

Zidane reported that the Italian had insulted his sister, a not uncommon occurrence at the highest levels of football, but the president of France, Jacques Chirac, was among those who appeared to condone the fêted player's act of shocking violence.

Yesterday former British prime minister John Major, like Sir Mick Jagger and the late Welsh poet Dylan Thomas a devotee of a game which used to be known as one of manners, was among the crowd at the Oval. He is one of those who has always argued that cricket provided a refuge from some of the worst pressures and cynicisms of modern life, but there was little protection in Kennington yesterday.

As former England captains David Gower, Mike Atherton, Ian Botham and Nasser Hussain, grappled to come to terms with the worst crisis since the International Cricket Council insisted on a World Cup staged partly in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Major's face spoke of shock and incomprehension.

The reaction was of men watching something they considered extremely precious break apart before their eyes.

Yesterday it was cricket's ordeal, cricket's pain. Tomorrow no doubt it could be almost any other sport's. One by one the games we play are falling into disrepute. One by one they are inviting the big question: how long can sport, in its present form and morality, survive?