MOVE over Osama, Denness is here. Forget Afghanistan, it's all happening in South Africa. Knee jerk reactions. Shrill, hysterical cries.
Riding an emotional tidal wave, many Indian cricket fans have quickly identified Mike Denness, the Scotland-born former England captain and the ICC match referee for the India-South Africa Test series, as the country's public enemy No.1.
But, then, now that the first flush of rage has been spent - or so one would like to assume - if you were to allow yourself a few quiet moments of reflection for a sane perspective of things vis a vis the latest controversy that threatens to split the cricketing world, then it may be possible to see it for what it is: a power struggle.
Denness, an upright gentleman and a hero in the eyes of some at the MCC members' bar at Lord's or at the MCG in Australia, and a biased villain in the eyes of many in the sub-continent, particularly in India, is actually a minor figure, a bit part player in a multi-part drama.
The former English captain and match referee - who found the world's most high profile cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar, guilty of tampering with the ball while also penalising five other Indian players for other code violations at Port Elizabeth - merely happened to pull the trigger.
The weapon was supplied by others who were nowhere in the picture at Port Elizabeth, the seeds of the battle which may - however much you wish that it wouldn't - develop into a full-scale war were sown long ago, and the most damaging battle-line, US versus THEM, was drawn by men who still lived in the past and failed to come to terms with the harsh realities of the present.
And the first reports of exchange of fire from the frontline have already come in, with South Africa and India joining hands to dump Mike Denness on the eve of the third Test and the ICC, for its part, sticking to its guns by withdrawing official recognition for the match.
The situation is more serious than can be imagined at this point with both sides taking extreme positions. What this means to a sport that is already suffering because of decline in fortunes in such once-powerful cricketing lands as the West Indies and England remains to be seen.
It is precisely because of all this that we would be deceiving ourselves if we believed that what happened at Port Elizabeth, featuring Denness and six Indian Test players, was an isolated incident with a trigger-happy official shooting from the hip to leave a half a dozen cricketers - and a whole nation - licking their wounds.
The history of the present conflict - and it is certainly that whether you like to call it that or not - can be traced back to the mid-1980s and the cricket boom in India inspired by the 1983 World Cup success and sustained by the television revolution.
It was then that the first few blows were struck at the Lord's power base, at cricket's White establishment to put it plainly. And with the game's fast expanding fan base in the sub-continent - which automatically meant fast expanding corporate support and money power - coinciding with the great game's sure decline in fortunes in its homeland, England, it was only a question of time before India and the sub-continent became the new spiritual home of the game.
Yet, this shift did not mean that there was a corresponding shift in terms of where the game's real control levers were located. These continued to remain at St. John's Wood, the London borough where the sport's most famous piece of real estate, Lord's, is located.
Well, at least not for sometime. It was only when Jagmohan Dalmiya finally managed take control of the sport in 1997 did the country that contributed so much to make the ICC balance sheet look good finally have one of its men at the helm for the first time.
Whether it was the perceptible sense of loss of power that Dalmiya's ascent induced in them or whether it was really because they thought that the means adopted by the Indian official to seize power were not 'cricket', it is hard to say, but this was the time when you could see the paper thin makings of the US versus THEM line drawn by the White establishment.
And the betting and match-fixing scandals, for a time, came as a sort of handy weapon for the erstwhile controllers at Lord's who smugly concluded that corruption was an inevitable outcome of the shift in the power base.
While it can never be argued that the illegal bookmakers of India and Pakistan were not primarily responsible for the corrupt practices that had invaded the gentleman's game, to have believed that only players from the sub-continent were likely to fall prey to the lure of bookies' black-money was a folly.
And how big a folly this was, was clear the moment the Delhi police produced the tapes that ended the career of a man who was, until then, believed to be a saint. Hansie Cronje's only Asian connection, to be sure, was represented by the millions he put away in whatever banks he put them away!
It is against this background that we must consider the latest controversy to hit the game. For, the moment Dalmiya stepped down from the helm, there was a clamour for cleaning up the game.
The new bunch of men in power in cricket's Old World once again climbed to the moral high ground, firm in their belief that they were the real - and only - guardians of the so-called spirit of the game.
And at the last meeting of ICC at Kuala Lumpur, the new ICC management made it clear to everyone who'd listen, armed suitably with a holier-then-thou attitude, that they meant business, that the game would indeed be taken back to its glory days when nobody cheated, when nobody did anything to hurt the spirit of cricket.
While it cannot be disputed that the game was in need of serious attention vis a vis certain trends that threatened to lead it down the abyss, the point is, the nostalgia-induced glory days were no more than a myth.
From the days of the good doctor (W.G.) Grace, cricket has always had it share of cheats. But with the advent of big money and the shift of focus to the sub-continent, a few other factors have gone into the equation.
And it is because of the appallingly condescending attitude of cricket's White establishment - which believes that the deterioration of standards in the game is largely because of the influence of the sub-continent's cricketing culture - that men such as Denness, who form a small part of it, tend to pull out the cane the moment an Indian player so much as scratches his jaw!
A lot has been said and written about the how the Indian players have been singled out for special treatment over the last few seasons. And even more has been said about how biased Denness was at Port Elizabeth where he failed to penalise Shaun Pollock or Nantie Hayward for precisely the very crime of which he found four Indians - Virender Sehwag, Shiv Sundar Das, Deep Dasgupta and Harbhajan Singh - guilty.
But a point that has not been raised is this: Indians, being an emotional people, do tend to over-do things when it comes to appealing. If that is a crime, then what of sledging, something that has been turned into an art-form by successive Australian and South African teams?
As for Sachin Tendulkar, perhaps no television replay would ever conclusively establish what the great little man was up to. But, to my mind, it seems outrageous to imagine that the world's most famous cricketer would attempt anything as ridiculously silly as tampering with the seam, knowing that the television cameras always tend to put everything he did on the field under the most intense scrutiny.
That Denness did what he did without any contribution from either of the umpires on the field makes the penalties even less acceptable than they might have been.
While you can question the very need for a match referee when there are two competent men on the field, even if you did accept that as a given, it is time the ICC laid out clear cut norms vis a vis penalties. They are far too subjective at present.
This apart, it seems utterly undemocratic in this day and age that the ICC should insist that the match referee's decisions were final and that the aggrieved party had no right to appeal against it. Such stipulations would surely lead to the Talibanisation of ICC administration. After all, even jailed terrorists are given the right to fight their cases in court in free societies.
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