By Denzil Fernandes

London, Aug 26: Former Australian umpire Darrell Hair is back at his old game. Despite retiring from umpiring duties he still wants to be in the thick of cricket action.

For that matter, Darrell Hair has always courted controversy from time to time. His latest outburst came earlier in the week when he called both Harbhajan Singh of India and Shoaib Akhtar of Pakistan ‘chuckers’ with suspect bowling action.

Having been ‘off’ umpiring work now, Hair has quickly written a 360 page book called ‘The Best Interest of the Game’ and made these eye catching comments while releasing the book. The Indian spinner called his remarks as ‘marketing gimmick to sell the book’. Akhtar too laughed off the comments.

Hair has always raised one’s hair with remarks that have not gone down well with the cricketers. He has mentioned that many top bowlers are ‘chuckers’ although not much has happened on those calls. In his book, he has also named Pakistan’s Mohammad Hafeez, South Africa’s Johan Botha and Bangladesh bowler Abdur Razzzaq with suspect bowling action. In fact, Harbhajan was also sent to Fred Titmus’ school in England to seek advice for correcting his bowling action a few years ago. All these players have continued playing for their countries.

Hair became famous in his career when he no balled Sri Lanka’s top spinner Mutthiah Muralitharan in 1995 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground seven times in three overs in the Boxing Day Test against Australia. In the year 2006, when Pakistan played England in the Oval Test, he awarded the match to England when Pakistan walked off protesting against umpire Hair for some of his decisions. Even in the last Indian tour of West Indies, skipper Dhoni lashed out at the ridiculous umpiring decisions by Hair most of which went against the Indians. Generally, the Indians have always received a raw deal from umpires like Darrell Hair including once when Ganguly captained the side to Australia earlier.

Everyone likes to write a book or two about their experiences with the game and the cricketers. That is another way of keeping their memories intact while earning a few extra bucks as well. And if you ever want to sell your book with a extra copies, all you have to do is to utter some hair raising statements about the stories in the book with perfect timing. And you will find the author running all the way to the bank to collect his dollars.

Darrell Hair has done exactly that to make his book a quick ‘best seller’. One thing will be that both Harbhajan Singh, Shoaib Akhtar and all others named in the book will surely be buying a copy of the book at least for their library !