Using the race issue is a rotten way to defend incompetence

Ian Wooldridge

Last updated at 00:00 07 March 2001


LIFE is unfair and if you don't understand that by the time you're 20 you are five O-Levels short of the pass-mark.

This doesn't quite seem to have seeped through to the England cricket team who went into today's second Test match in Sri Lanka seething with resentment about the unfairness that confronted them in the first.

They were never going to win it but they may have saved it if they had not met some of the most iniquitously impoverished and inexperienced umpiring in the history of big cricket. There is no suggestion that the umpires cheated, only that they were hopelessly bad.

Regrettably, since one umpire was Sri Lankan and the other Indian, this has now widened into a racial issue. As I wrote in this space last week the Daily Mail respects its readers and thus prominently printed a letter yesterday from Mr Seevali Abeysekera, of Hayes, Middlesex, who was deeply offended by Sportsmail's comments about the umpiring in Galle.

The implication was that they came under the hammer because they were Asian.

This was not the case at all. They were severely criticised because they were useless.

Peter Johnson, our man in Sri Lanka and I, who watched hours on television, are both old enough not to give a stuff about who wins a Test match. We are also both experienced enough to recognise ridiculous umpiring when we see it.

This race sensitivity can become extremely tiresome.

Ian Chappell, the former Australian captain currently commentating on radio in India, has just caused a national scandal by saying that Souvrav Ganguly, India's captain: 'Should have been kicked up the backside,' for his part in a disastrous run-out in a Test match. This has caused huge offence. By heavens, the Indians should hear what the little Australian republican bastard calls me, a staunch Royalist when we meet.

What we must hope for in the next few days is that England's cricketers can confine their resentment and that the umpiring is up to a reasonable standard.

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