A photo is worth a thousand words, but the snap of Mike Gatting and Shakoor Rana’s little tête-à-tête in 1987 screamed just one word in the cricket world – CRISIS! Never before in the history of Test cricket had an umpire’s authority been so brazenly challenged in the heat of battle.
Our story begins in Faisalabad in December 1987, the second Test of the series between Pakistan and England. There was bad blood between the two sides even before the series began; the summer series in England had been riddled with rancour with the Pakistanis not only winning but also taking objection to the presence of umpire David Constant. He was, they declared, incompetent, as some of his decisions had proved.
This was the era before neutral umpires, and Pakistan believed ‘that English umpires are no longer the best in the world’. England shrugged off the criticism, but they probably knew what was coming when they travelled to Pakistan a few months later.
In the first Test in Lahore the decisions got so bad that eventually Chris Broad snapped and refused to leave the crease when given out caught behind. Martin Johnson, writing in the Independent, said that ‘at a conservative estimate’ Broad’s bat had missed the ball by ‘the width of another bat’. Nonetheless, his refusal to leave the crease for nearly a minute was stunning. ‘Not even the owner of the longest memory in the press box could remember anything quite like it,’ wrote Johnson.
Pakistan demanded that Broad be sent home; England demanded an improvement in umpiring standards in time for the second Test. Neither demand was fulfilled.
Matters came to a head at the end of the second day of the second Test in Faisalabad. England had scored 292 in their first innings, and Pakistan were in trouble at 106 for five in reply. As spinner Eddie Hemmings trundled in to bowl his penultimate delivery to Salim Malik, England captain Mike Gatting decided to bring his deep square leg fielder in from the boundary to try to save the single so that the inexperienced non-striker, Aamir Malik, would have to bat out the final over of the day.
Abiding by the courteous code of cricket, Gatting informed Salim of his intention, which Salim acknowledged, but as Hemmings began his run-up Gatting, out of view of Salim, signalled to his incoming fielder to stop ‘because I didn’t want him too close’.
Gatting had done nothing wrong, and as the Guardian noted, the ‘duty to inform a facing batsman of out-of-vision field changes lies with his batting partner’.
But the umpire standing at square leg, Shakoor Rana, stopped play to tell the batsmen what the English were up to. Gatting was furious. ‘I told the umpire that I didn’t think it was his role to interfere like that and he replied that I was cheating by what was going on,’ said Gatting.
Rana claimed later that Gatting had called him a ‘shit umpire’. Challenged on this by the press, Gatting replied: ‘Well, you’ve all been watching.’
Rana, on the other hand, allegedly called Gatting a ‘fucking cheating cunt’, though it was the umpire who said he was shocked by the language employed by the England captain.
The next day Shakoor refused to resume umpiring until he had an unequivocal apology from Gatting for his alleged foul language. Gatting said he would comply provided Rana said sorry for calling him a cheat. Rana replied that he ‘had merely warned Gatting of unfair play’.
As the Pakistan press clamoured for Gatting to be sacked, so the English press got behind their man. Acknowledging that Gatting had been ‘wrong to question the umpire so openly and aggressively’, the general consensus was: who wouldn’t have cracked under such intense provocation?
For a day there was an impasse (and no cricket), though Rana stoked the flames by claiming Gatting had called him a ‘bastard son of a bitch’ and saying: ‘In this country people have been murdered for less.’ No one of Gatting’s acquaintance had ever heard him utter such a preposterous phrase – on or off a cricket field.
There was bad blood between the sides even before the series began
Eventually Gatting was forced to apologise by the Test and County Cricket Board in what they called the ‘the wider interests of the game’. He did as instructed, though Rana remained silent in return.
The England players were furious at what they viewed as their governing body’s capitulation, but tour manager Peter Lush explained that they had no choice, and to sweeten them he arranged a ‘hardship bonus’ of £1,000 for each player. ‘We hoped things could be settled with a handshake but it got beyond that,’ said Lush. ‘The action we took then of Gatting’s unconditional apology was forced on us after we spent two days trying to find a reasonable solution.’
The spat even made the pages of the New York Times, not an organ known for its coverage of cricket. They called on former England captain turned broadcaster Tony Lewis for help in explaining the seriousness of the row: ‘It sounds very British,’ he told them, ‘but you’ve got to do your duty and obey the umpire.’
The spat even made the pages of the New York Times
Despite the gravity of the dispute, the ICC was (characteristically) slow to react, and ironically it was a Pakistan player – captain Imran Khan – who pioneered the selection of neutral umpires for Tests, inviting Englishmen John Hampshire and John Holder to Pakistan for their home series against India in 1989/90. The ICC eventually cottoned on to the idea in 1991, appointing first one neutral umpire and, ten years later, two. But as we’ll see with object ninety-one, that still wasn’t much help when Pakistan arrived in England in 2006.