It is worth examining how English defamation law would deal with such a scenario. In order to bring a defamation action, a player would need to show that the allegation identifies him and would lower him in the eyes of an ordinary person. There is little doubt that it is defamatory to accuse a sportsperson of cheating. The legal test for identification is whether a reasonable person would think the allegation refers to a particular player. Where a team is accused, this could identify all members of the team. In this case, Inzamam ul-Haq appears to have taken responsibility for the charges on behalf of his players (he is awaiting a disciplinary hearing), but that makes little difference to the legal position. As the whole team appears to stand accused, all eleven players could sue.

If that happened, how could Mr Hair defend himself? The defence of justification (truth) requires that he proves to the jury that on the balance of probabilities the ball has been illegitimately interfered with by the claimant. If there is no video evidence of anyone actually tampering with the ball, that may be difficult. Furthermore, if all eleven players were to sue it seems unlikely that the umpire could prove that every claimant had been responsible.

The defence of fair comment would be easier. The umpire would only have to prove that his allegation was an honest opinion based on true facts. Perhaps he could rely on the state of the ball as the true fact, his opinion being that it had been tampered with. This defence would work for umpires who could prove the underlying facts. But in some cases, television replays show that an umpire has actually made a mistake of fact. In football, a player may be sent off for committing a foul but the television replay shows that there was no contact between the players. In such a case, there may be no true facts on which the official could base his opinion and so the defence would fail.

The defence of fair comment is also defeated if the player proves that the umpire had made the allegation maliciously. Malice generally means that the umpire did not honestly believe what he said was true. Allegations of malice could themselves give rise to a defamation action by the umpire against those making them.

There are two other possible defences that could be used in this situation. The first is called qualified privilege. This public interest defence is likely to apply where an umpire has a duty to communicate his views and the recipients (the team and the public) have a reciprocal interest to receive this information. As with fair comment, qualified privilege can be defeated if the player proves the umpire was being malicious.

The other defence could be consent. To an extent, all players consent to being judged by an umpire and accept that decisions directly related to the sporting environment and within the bounds of reason are part of the game.

Whatever the legal possibilities for a libel action between the umpire and the players, to allow libel actions to proceed successfully against umpires, referees and sporting bodies each time there is an allegation of cheating would probably cause sport a great disservice and undermine even further the difficult job of officiating. No sports fan wants to see a situation in which officials are afraid of making decisions for fear of being hit with libel proceedings. But it's not out of the question.

Niri Shan and Timothy Pinto are media lawyers at Taylor Wessing.