Hairy Situation, part II: Bad Idea

There's a good article in the Guardian about the latest turn in cricket's biggest soap opera.

Hair tried to ask discreetly for half a million dollars in exchange for retiring. I don't want to be too judgmental here - I've had some bad days at the office in my life but I've never been burned in effigy or had a nuclear-armed world leader attack me in the press for something I did at work - but this ranks among some of the most impressive bad ideas.

Now that this information is public, this mess is no longer about whether a Pakistan player tampered with the ball. If they did in fact tamper with the ball, then this is a bad develoment. If they're innocent, as they've claimed so forcefully, then they have won a victory of sorts for justice within cricket, though at a heavy price both for them and for the ICC and the umpires. I still think the most likely scenario is that Hair was just doing his job, but perhaps quite badly in this matter.

Presumably if the ball had shown compelling visible signs of tampering we would have seen it by now. I really want that ball to be on public display, and let me be the first blogger to name it "the Hair-ball".