So, the ICC has ruled on the Pakistan ball-tampering case and it has come up with a remarkably sensible result. Inzamam-ul-Haq has been found guilty of bringing the game into disrepute for staging a sit-in protest against an umpiring decision, which is quite right because he did do those things. He has been found not guilty of ball tampering for the very simple reason that there was no compelling evidence that the ball had been tampered with.

There will doubtless be a lot of nonsense talked about this. The Guardian has already weighed in on the side of Pakistan-baiters (this is their sports pages, remember, not their political writers) by claiming that the ruling makes Law 42.3 unworkable. For those of you not familiar with the Laws of Cricket, the BBC explains what this law says. You’ll note that the law says that teams should be punished if they have tampered with the ball. It does not say that they should be punished if the umpire takes it into his head to accuse them of ball tampering without any evidence that they did so.

So, if an umpire catches a player gouging at a ball with a nail file, he punishes him for tampering with the ball. If he simply thinks that a ball may have been tampered with, but cannot prove that it has been, then he can’t take action on the field. Simple.

Now if only we had umpires with the same level of common sense as the ICC, rather than umpires who fancy themselves as judge, jury and executioner, we wouldn’t have got into this mess. Fortunately the vast majority of professional umpires are indeed very sensible. There’s only one who causes this level of fuss, and the sooner he is removed from the official umpiring panel the better.