SO, IMAGINE you are umpiring at a village cricket match on Sunday. A serious village cricket match, one that decides the league, with pride and bragging rights and maybe even a slice of small-potatoes prizemoney at stake.

You think that the fast bowler, a parish priest, is having a sneaky go at the seam. In fact, you are sure of it. You consult your umpiring partner and he agrees that it looks suspicious. So you call a five-run penalty and all hell breaks loose. How dare you . . . outrageous accusation . . . where is the evidence . . . on whose authority . . .

And there is the heart of the matter. Your evidence. Your authority. Just because it didn’t happen on Sky, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There are thousands of Darrell Hairs at matches all over Britain every weekend, from first-class grounds to village squares, all left to make judgments without the benefit of a third eye and 26 camera positions and, amazingly, batsmen are still given out without a strike being called, a sit-in attempted or religious tensions inflamed.

When the International Cricket Council sits on Friday to hear the charges relating to ball-tampering and match forfeiture, the issue of evidence beyond that of Hair’s opinion should not be overplayed. He is not a detective. He does not have to make a forensic case, provide eyewitness accounts or a written confession.

As one of the ten best umpires in the world, we presume that he knows the difference between balls weathered by play and one that has been altered artificially. Ian Botham, Nasser Hussain, Michael Atherton and the many others queueing up to argue that something is only true if it is captured for action replay have lost sight of the primary issue. No incontrovertible proof is required beyond the belief of the umpire that cheating has taken place. Everything else is chatter.

Unfortunately, it is a chatter that pervades, the relentless scrutiny of every decision now being the lifeblood of modern sports programming. At the weekend, Match of the Day kicked off the football season by picking to pieces Liverpool’s penalty at Sheffield United, a handball given against Chris Powell, the Watford defender, at Everton and the straight red card awarded to Andy Todd, the Blackburn Rovers captain, against Portsmouth.

The Powell decision was a travesty, Todd may have been hard done by and Steven Gerrard’s penalty we could still be debating now. So it is with cricket.

The performances of referees and umpires are analysed to death, their reputations smeared. Yet where has this got us? To the naked eye, every refereeing judgment trashed by Gary Lineker and football friends on Saturday appeared, at first sight, to be correct. So ban action replays and there would be no controversy.

With modern technology, however, that is impossible, and instead we charge preposterously in the opposite direction, where unless an incident was on tape, analysts hold court as if it was the product of a fevered imagination.

So ignore Sky and turn away from political agitators, too. Shahriyar Khan, the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, appears most confused. “What a wonderful sight it is to see cricket between Pakistan, a Muslim country, and England, where the majority are Christian. Why destroy this over a technicality?” he asked. With respect, Shahriyar does not know his technicalities from his elbow. The rules of cricket are not a technicality; Muslims and Christians, in this context, are. The most stupid, the most catastrophically misguided aspect of this debate is the one that insists on bringing the world of religious politics into a row about cheating in a cricket match.

Hair, we are told, has added to the volatile relationship between East and West. So, presumably, the next time London or Bali goes up, we can attach his decision to the list of liberal hand-wringing explanations for the atrocity. “Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon — and that Aussie bloke who called Pakistan for ball-tampering at the Oval. Well, what did we expect?” It is shocking the way a decision made purely in a sporting arena has been so self-servingly transferred to the political.

“All the Muslim players are sensitive individuals who are very opposed to terrorist activities,” Bob Woolmer, the Pakistan coach, said. “To accuse Pakistan of cheating brings these tensions to the fore. I wonder whether Darrell realises the consequences of his actions.”

What consequences? What tensions? Are we meant to applaud Woolmer’s Pakistan team for their sensitivity in not endorsing mass murder? Are we meant to worry that, having been accused of ball-tampering, they now will? Is this Woolmer’s intended inference, or is he clumsily linking two issues that are so far apart on the political and moral compass that even to hear them mentioned in the same thought process is tantamount to a declaration of war on intelligence? It is unfortunate that the characters at the centre of cricket’s crisis are noted for intransigence, just as it was harmful to Britain 25 years ago when the leading figures on the right and left of politics were Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill. No good can come of a dispute between extremes.