By IANS,
Sydney : Australian umpire Darrell Hair has lambasted International Cricket Council (ICC) chief executive Haroon Lorgat for his insensitive comments on the Lahore terror attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team.
Lorgat asked the match officials caught in the Lahore attack to be “more rational” about their experience. Australian umpires Simon Taufel and Steve Davis have complained that Pakistan failed to protect them when gunmen opened fire as they travelled behind the Sri Lanka team bus in Lahore last Tuesday.
They umpires felt that they were left like sitting ducks for the terrorists, who sprayed bullets on their convoy that left eight Pakistanis dead and seven Sri Lankan players and an assistant coach wounded.
But ICC chief executive Lorgat suggested that the match officials were overwrought and needed to reflect on events calmly.
Reacting to Lorgat’s comments, a furious Hair said: “No one could possibly comprehend the frightening and life threatening nature of the predicament they found themselves in.”
“For Mr Lorgat to blandly ask them to be ‘more rational’ I think (smacks of) bullying and they are embarrassed that the full truth of the situation came out into the open,” Hair was quoted as saying by the Australian media.
Hair reacted in his capacity as the head of the New South Wales Umpires and Scorers Association, which has Taufel as a life member. Hair said that both Taufel and Davis’ comments on the attack were measured and rational.
He took a dig at Lorgat saying that the ICC chief executive should go on a management course, which would help him to understand his organisation’s duty of care to players and officials, which it had “clearly failed to provide on this occasion”.
“I wonder if Mr Lorgat would be making his shallow and insincere comments if it had been he trapped in a hail of bullets and felt abandoned by the very security forces that were supposed to protect them,” Hair said.
“Does someone have to die before ICC even remotely begins to understand the reality of the matter?” Hair said .
“It is one thing to provide security and protection but another to actually be secure and protected. Quite simply, ICC and the PCB (Pakistan Cricket Board) totally failed the Sri Lankan players and the umpires, full stop,” he said.