Cricket the loser as ICC inquiry shuts the stable door
05-11-2010 10:21 am

Fears that the ICC’s internal inquiry into the February 26 riot in Kathmandu, which disrupted the closing stages of the World Cricket League Division 5 tournament, would yield no justice for Singapore turned out to be fully justified yesterday, with the publication of the three-man group’s final report.

Although its authors profess to be ‘extremely sympathetic’ to the position of Singapore, who missed out on promotion to Division 4 after the rioting crowd’s intervention led to a recalculation of the USA’s target in their match against Nepal, and they concede that ‘the interruption itself was critical for Singapore’, they conclude that there is no remedy available to the ICC to correct a palpable injustice.

They seem more concerned, indeed, to vindicate the actions of ICC officials during and after the disturbances than they are to address that fundamental issue, and their recommendations, while drawing attention to some gaps in the existing regulatory structures, offer no constructive solution to the central problem, that Nepal benefited directly from a Nepalese crowd’s misconduct.

There is much in the 28-page report with which it is possible to agree. The conduct of the umpires and the Tournament Referee during and immediately after the riot, and the calculation of a Duckworth/Lewis target once it was possible for the match to resume, appear to have been correct, and the same goes for the working out of the net run rates after the conclusion of play, which put the USA and Nepal into Division 4 and left Singapore in third place.

It was, we have always argued, with the response of the Event Technical Committee later that evening that things started to go badly wrong. With the ICC media staff actively seeking to minimise the seriousness of what had taken place, the three-man Committee – which included a representative of the Nepal CA – allowed the results to stand and rejected Singapore’s protest.

Although the inquiry team implicitly acknowledges the justice of Singapore’s subsequent objection to the Nepalese presence in the ETC by recommending that ‘to avoid allegations of conflict of interest, further consideration be given to providing in the ETC terms of reference for the replacement of an ETC member where adjudication is required on issues affecting that member’s affiliated team’, it argues that the decisions taken by the ETC on 26 February would only be subject to challenge ‘if there was obvious evidence of bias exercised in the decision making process’ (p. 14), and in the absence of such evidence insists that its decisions must be allowed to stand.

The report adds:
Moreover, the decisions of the ETC concerned the primary question of whether or not the decisions and actions that were taken by the Playing Control Team were consistent with the Playing Conditions governing the event. In our view, the decisions made in the ETC letter of response were, with the exception of paragraph 5 of that latter, entirely correct. This in itself would suggest that there was no evidence of bias on the part of the ETC or any one of its members in particular.

Two things need to be said about this passage. One is that the admitted error in paragraph 5 of the ETC letter, which concerned the various permutations of the outcome of the match, indicates that in a confused situation the Committee had been wrongly advised when it took its decision. But the other is much more important: by defining its task as evaluating the ‘decisions and actions’ of the Playing Control Team the ETC, like the inquiry team after it, set the terms of the debate in such a way as to avoid entirely the central question, namely, should Nepal be allowed to benefit from the outrageous conduct of its fans?

It is on this issue that the report ventures into its most contentious claims. First, it states that ‘it is not correct to say that there is a duty on the Nepal team (or CAN for that matter) to ensure that the crowd does not interrupt a match . . . The relevant duty is the duty on the part of the organizer to take reasonable steps to remove or minimize the extent of that interruption.’ (p. 21). It even goes so far as to assert that crowd disturbances ‘are accepted as an unfortunate part of the game’.

By seeking to make a spurious distinction between the Nepal team and its governing body (‘There is certainly room for arguing that a team is not necessarily the same thing as their national association . . . ‘), the inquiry team manages to avoid confronting directly the injustice of Nepal’s promotion at the expense of Singapore as a result of the crowd’s behaviour.

Nor does the report adequately take on the question of whether CAN did indeed ‘take reasonable steps to remove or minimize the extent of’ the interruption, although by describing the existing safety measures as ‘unacceptable and not in the best interests of cricket’ it might be thought to imply that it did not.

But none of that turns out to matter very much in the inquiry team’s view, since they contend that even if it could be established that ‘the Nepal team or CAN benefitted unfairly from their own inability to control the crowd’, nothing in the ICC’s existing rules and regulations would entitle Singapore to a remedy. Whereas FIFA’s Disciplinary Code allows a club or association to be penalised for spectator misconduct, it observes in a footnote, ‘ICC does not have any such regulations’, and it eventually recommends that ‘further consideration be given’ to remedying this omission. That is cold comfort for Singapore.

The impression that the team’s starting point was that whatever injustice Singapore may have suffered, nothing could or should be done to rectify it, is reinforced by some of its argument in justification of this conclusion. It is true that even though, as the report acknowledges, ‘’if there was no interruption such that a full 50-over game was indeed completed, then Singapore would have been promoted to Division 4’ (p. 23), an interruption might have occurred through rain – or the intervention of a passing meteorite.

But the fact is that it didn’t. It came through the misconduct of the home crowd. And the report’s subsequent claim, that ‘once the incident had occurred, there were a great number of other variables which contributed to the ultimate outcome, including the length of the interruption, the time of the re-start, the USA scoring rate etc.’, suggests both a fundamental failure to understand the concept of a dependent variable – all those factors were directly related to the fact of the riot – and a somewhat desperate casting around for arguments to justify the unjustifiable.

Nothing can remove the fundamental truth: at 15:32 on Friday, 26 February, with Sushil Nadkarni cutting loose and the USA within 13 runs of a comprehensive victory which would have put Nepal into third place and denied them promotion, the Nepalese crowd rioted, producing a chain of events which led directly to Nepal’s promotion at the expense of Singapore.

I repeat the question I asked on 28 February: suppose these exact circumstances were to be repeated during next year’s World Cup, with India the beneficiaries and England the victims – or more clearly still, with England the beneficiaries and India the victims. Do we honestly believe that the outcome would be a little gentle hand-wringing, and a ‘Sorry, chaps, we did everything we could, but there’s nothing to be done about it’?

Two more things need to be said about the report. One is that it is at pains to deny any suggestion that corruption was somehow involved in the events of 26 February, citing ‘intimations’ from the Singapore CA that there were ‘too many co-incidences’ involved. Since the phrase ‘too many co-incidences’ does not appear anywhere in the documents published along with the report, it is impossible to see where this came from, and the inquiry team’s denials look very much like a ‘straw man’ argument, set up only so it can be knocked down.

The other is that the selection of the annexures appended to the report seems less than fully transparent: while the team chooses to publish Nepalese captain Paras Khadka’s (confidential) report on the umpires, which really adds nothing substantive to the discussion, it does not provide either the ETC’s terms of reference, which are frequently referred to and clearly crucial to the issue, or Tournament Referee David Jukes’s two notices of ‘an alleged “Security and Safety Breach”’, the interpretation of which is in dispute.

All in all, we are faced with a most unsatisfactory conclusion to a most unhappy affair. Internal inquiries are always open to the accusation of whitewash, and this one is no exception. For all the inquiry team’s professed sympathy with Singapore’s case they offer them nothing, and the recommendations for ‘further consideration’ of changes to the regulatory structure do nothing to rectify a manifest injustice.

The Kathmandu tournament ended with the reputation of the Nepalese fans severely tarnished. But they are not the ultimate victims of this miserable story, and strangely enough neither is Singapore (where, coincidentally, the ICC has decided to hold this year’s annual conference). It is the ICC itself, and its competence in managing the global game, which suffers most.

’Great Sport Great Spirit’, proclaims the stationery on which the report is published. And it would seem that they can’t see the irony!