Disgraced international umpire Darrell Hair has called ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat a bully
Disgraced international umpire Darrell Hair has called ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat a bully for suggesting that match referee Chris Broad and umpires Simon Taufel and Steve Davis, who officiated in last week's Lahore Test, be more "rational" about their experience (KHALIDOSCOPE, March 9) in the terrorist attack.
The match officials have lashed out at the Pakistani authorities for failing to protect them when gunmen targeted the van in which they were traveling to Gaddafi Stadium.
On Sunday, Lorgat told the media here in Sydney that the officials were over-wrought and needed to reflect on the events more calmly.
"I am mindful of the experience they have gone through and I think it is a difficult time for them," Lorgat said.
"I guess if you or I had gone through something we might have reacted in a similar fashion and I think we must just understand the context and we must just allow them to settle them and be more rational in their assessment of what has transpired."
However Hair, who now heads the New South Wales Umpires and Scorers Association, was not impressed.
The former ICC umpire described Lorgat's attitude as "shallow, insincere and impossible to accept."
"No one could possibly comprehend the frightening and life-threatening nature of the predicament they found themselves in," Hair said in an e-mail yesterday
"For Mr Lorgat to blandly ask them to be 'more rational' I think (smacks of) bullying and they are embarrassed the full truth of the situation came out into the open.
"I wonder if Mr Lorgat would be making his shallow and insincere comments if it had been him trapped in a hail of bullets and (who) felt abandoned by the very security forces that were supposed to protect them."
Hair suggested Lorgat go on a management course to help him understand his role as head of the ICC and his organisation's duty of care to players and officials, which it had "clearly failed to provide on this occasion."
Simon Taufel feels the security failure was symptomatic of cricket's wider problems.
After a two-hour meeting with Lorgat yesterday, Taufel, ranked the world's best ICC umpire for the past four years, said: "Haroon and I talked about the experience of Lahore, but more particularly we talked about the broader picture and what the ICC could do to deal with the issue involved.
"It's got implications for how the ICC operates in future," he said.
