Cricket Umpire Darrell Hair has been under fire for charging the Pakistan team with ball-tampering in a recent test match against England. Having examined the ball, and conferred with a colleague, he deducted five runs from Pakistan’s total as a penalty. Pakistan were, at this point, well in the lead in the match, but staged a sit-in protest in the dressing room, refusing to continue play. The match was then abandoned and awarded to England.

Since all that happened, Hair has been accused of racism, of systematically favouring the opponents of Asian nations over the years. The International Cricket Council were due to hold a disciplinary hearing to examine the ball-tampering charge, and hopefully resolve the furore surrounding Hair, when they called a press-conference. In it, ICC Chief Executive Malcolm Speed made what the press has labelled a shocking revelation: Hair had offered to retire from umpiring in return for a secret payment of $500,000. For full transparency, they published the e-mail correspondence in which Hair made the offer.

There are two interpretations of the e-mail exchange. According to the first, Hair was feeling the pressure and offered the ICC a solution that was in both their best interests and his. If he stayed, the ICC would be stuck with an Umpire who couldn’t preside over many matches due to the allegations of bias. If he stayed, he would have to continue to face down criticism from the press and from his opponents in cricket. The game would be tarnished; his career, ruined. The $500,000 would pay up his contract, which had several years left to run, and get both parties out of difficulty.

As Malcolm Speed admitted, however, there was a much more sinister reading of events. He urged the press not to accept it. According to this reading, Hair was blackmailing the ICC, using his power to contain the emerging crisis in order to extract money from them. Some even suggested that he might have deliberately created the scandal in order to get himself a pay-off.

How credible was Speed’s claim that this more sinister view of events was mistaken, that Hair had acted honourably throughout?

Speed’s reputation, on the face of it, is solid enough. As the Chief Executive of the ICC, he certainly has high status; he is in an important position of trust. This lends credibility to his claim.

His ability to see is more limited; it’s difficult for him to tell what was going on in Hair’s head. Yes, he had access to the e-mail correspondence, but he admitted in the press conference that this could be read in either of two ways. Unless he had private correspondence or conversations with Hair in addition to the published e-mails, then his access to the evidence is the same as everyone else’s, and so he is basing his interpretation of events on background knowledge rather than clear first-hand evidence.

Speed certainly suffers from a vested interest. As someone with a great deal invested in the cricket, and whose responsiblity is to protect the sport, he has a lot to lose if the reputation of cricket is damaged. This certainly weakens his sympathic interpretation of Hair’s actions.

Speed’s level of expertise is a little difficult to assess. In this context, expertise would involve knowledge of Hair. Is Hair the type of person who would try to make money out of a potential disaster? Without better knowledge of the relationship between the two, it’s impossible to tell whether Speed possesses this expertise.

Finally, there is the issue of neutrality, which is again difficult to assess. If Speed and Hair have had a long and productive professional relationship, as may well be the case, then Speed may well have a bias towards Hair, and so a reason to defend him. If, on the other hand, they have no such rapport, or even a disliking for each other, then things may be different.

To reach an overall judgement on the credibility of Speed’s claim, then, his reputation and possible expertise must be weighed against his poor ability to see, vested interest, and possible bias.

What’s your judgement?

In the recent Man City vs Portsmouth match, Ben Thatcher deliberately elbowed Pedro Mendes in the face. Mendes was knocked unconscious, and suffered a fit on the way to hospital. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem that any lasting damage was done; things could have been a lot worse. Everyone, even Thatcher’s team-mates and manager, agreed that it was a disgraceful challenge.

So far, Thatcher’s punishment has been too soft. The referee, who clearly should have shown him a red card, only booked him. His club have since fined him £22,000, which is substantial but, for a Premiership footballer, easily affordable. The FA is trying to find a way to impose an additional punishment, which would presumably be a ban of about half-a-dozen games, but generally only impose retrospective punishments for match incidents that the referee missed completely, rather than incidents like this one where the referee saw it but got it wrong.

Some have said that in addition to any punishments imposed by Man City, Thatcher should face criminal charges for assault. There is some precedent for this–about a decade ago, Duncan Ferguson was once charged by the police for a head-butt that happened during a match–but generally the attitude of those in the game is that what happens on the pitch stays on the pitch.

Thatcher’s manager Stuart Pearce, and player and pundit Danny Mills have offered similar arguments against police involvement. In comments reported by the BBC, Pearce put it like this:

“Anything that happens on a football pitch should be governed by the FA and FIFA. Once you start involving the police, the floodgates can open and you could end up with a situation where players are arrested during a game.”

The argument here is that if the police get involved in this incident, then they’ll end up involved in every incident, and that would be undesirable. To avoid that situation, we should resist police involvement in this incident. This is a classic example of the slippery slope fallacy. It’s perfectly possible for police to get involved in a very few cases without being drawn into every game.

There was a humorous piece in the Sports section of the Guardian recently, written by Harry Pearson and entitled “Super-Sized Stars Need Bringing Down a Leg or Two”. It related to recent complaints that the present generation of golfers are hitting the ball too far.

As golfers have grown bigger and stronger, holes that used to be challenging par 5s have been getting easier. Golfers used to struggle to reach the greens of such holes in 3 shots; now, all too often, they can comfortably get there in two. Par 4 holes, too, no longer present the difficulties that they were designed to. For those at the top of the sport, golf has become too easy.

The author of the article proposed a solution to this problem: hack the legs off golfers. This would limit their ablity to send the ball soaring over the horizon, restoring the challenge of the game. Of course, he proposed this solution tongue-in-cheek, but the argument that he offered for it nicely illustrated a logical fallacy. It went like this:

“Golfers have quite literally outgrown their sport. The solution is either to make the courses bigger–something that is practically impossible since, as far as I can judge, they already cover 80% of the world’s non-urban landmass–or make the golfers smaller. There would be a number of ways of achieving the latter, but clearly the cheapest, quickest and, to those of us with a marked antipathy to the game, most cheerful way would simply be to cut off their legs with a chainsaw. Some readers will feel this is cruel and inhumane, but experts assure me that so long as it was blindfolded before tackling Ian Poulter the chainsaw would suffer no lasting trauma.”

The implied conclusion here–that we should take a chainsaw to golfers’ knees–is arrived at by restricting the options. According to Harry Pearson, we must choose between two options: making golf courses larger or making golfers smaller. As the former solution is impractical, we are forced to adopt the latter.

This, of course, ignores a number of other solutions, some of which are alluded to elsewhere in the article: we could make golf balls heavier or less aerodynamic; we could change the heads or shafts of golf clubs to make them less efficient; we could get rid of tees for driving. Without considering and eliminating these alternatives, the argument (thankfully, from the golfers’ perspective) can’t establish its conclusion.