No More Weak Puns

Having expended several thousand words in the early days of this blog in the summer of 2006 on the whys and wherefores of the Darrell Hair saga, I deliberately decided not to comment on his tribunal until after it had concluded. Now it has - and, from a distance, it seemed to be a strange, anti-climactic and amusing affair - I still don't have a lot to add to what I said last year.

As one of the minority of people outside Australia who always had, at the very least, a lot of sympathy for Hair, I can only reiterate that it seems to me very silly that an official of the quality of Hair cannot get a game while the other Australian DH, Daryl Harper, a nice bloke but an utterly mediocre umpire, remains on the ICC's Elite Panel. However, despite what Malcolm Speed said, it's very hard to see Hair appearing in many more Tests. None of the Asian countries will touch him with a bargepole and he can't officiate when Australia are involved which just leaves games between England, South Africa, New Zealand and West Indies, and there aren't that many of those.

So, I might not be writing about Darrell very much more, which, if nothing else, means that I won't be needing to rack my brain for shallow puns based on his surname.

I won't miss that, and nor, I suspect, will anyone else.