Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? — Ulysses

It is clear that the International Cricket Council (ICC) has been pondering long and fruitfully on this text from the great book. Certainly, it has decided that history can be undone and put together again in a new form. In a strange, and rather disturbing, precedent, it has said that the match between England and Pakistan at the Brit Oval in 2006 was not, after all, a win for England. It was a draw.

Julius Caesar lives, Pyrrhus survives and the history of the world is thereby changed for ever. It’s a bizarre business, the more so because on one level, the ICC seems to have got it right. That match in question ended when Darrell Hair, acting on a half-baked hunch and an overcooked sense of his own importance, called the match off.

He had deducted five runs from Pakistan because he had, you know, a sort of feeling that they were tampering with the ball. The Pakistan team had a bit of a grump during the tea interval and were late in coming back out. Both teams were ready to carry on: the spectators were ready to watch, the viewers were ready to view, the commentators were ready to comment, the press were ready to write, but Hair was not ready to umpire. So he called the game off and awarded it to England. Now the ICC has, again, made it clear that he was wrong to do so.

Which is fair enough so far as it goes. But where does it stop? Perhaps it should now award the 2005 Ashes series to Australia rather than England. That’s because the match at Edgbaston should have been won by Australia. It finished when England at last ended the Australia tail’s extraordinary resistance and Michael Kasprowicz gloved a ball to the wicketkeeper.

But subsequent examination of the slow-motion replay revealed that Kasprowicz had taken his hand off the bat, and was therefore not out. So he should have stayed in, and either he or Brett Lee knocked off the few runs that Australia needed, and taken Australia to a 2-0 lead. Australia therefore won the series 2-1.

Or take the famous joust between Allan Donald, of South Africa, and Mike Atherton, then slumming it as England’s opening batsman before he became Chief Cricket Correspondent of this parish. In the course of that fabulous passage of play, Atherton gloved one to the wicketkeeper. His hand was on the bat. But it wasn’t given, Atherton stood firm, England went on to win. So perhaps this victory should also be reversed.

But why stop there? If the ICC has taken on Time itself, it should have no problem in taking on a few sports outside its traditional remit. Football, for example. Surely these shrewd judges from the ICC could not hold the view that Geoff Hurst’s second goal was legitimate? Perhaps a specially appointed committee of cricketers would come up with the conclusion that in the final of the World Cup of 1966, the ball did not cross the line and, therefore, that the final should be awarded to West Germany.

Then they could decide that Damon Hill, rather than Michael Schumacher, won the Formula One driver’s championship in 1994. Schumacher won after he had driven into Hill, and that was clearly an illegal move. An ancient wrong would thus be righted. And while they’re at it, what about the first bout between Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield? This was bizarrely scored as a draw and, as such, it allowed Holyfield to keep his world heavyweight title. So maybe that bit of history should be changed as well.

There are, of course, times when results really have been changed in retrospect. Ben Johnson won the gold medal in the 100 metres at the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988; the result was changed after Johnson failed a drugs test and the race was awarded to Carl Lewis.

It has happened in horse racing, too. Tied Cottage hammered the lot of them in the 1980 Cheltenham Gold Cup, winning by eight lengths, and lost the race after he, too, failed a dope test. The race was then given to Master Smudge, one of the least distinguished Gold Cup winners in history.

But why stop at sport? I am thinking of asking the ICC to change a few results of my own. Perhaps they could reverse my sacking from the South China Morning Post, which was a bad result for me and possibly — well, maybe — an unfair one.

Or perhaps they could change the result of my encounter with the delicious Shay Cunliffe and reverse her decision to dump me. At a stroke, I could be living with her in Hollywood.

Well, as Stephen Dedalus muses in Ulysses, is what happens both irretrievable and inevitable? Or is “what if” a legitimate question? Is it really acceptable to play fast and loose with history? Could the French reverse the result of Agincourt, the Scots reverse Culloden, the Germans reverse the Battle of Britain?

Clearly not. So why do it in sport? Anyone would think that sport was trivial, or something. And that would never do. The thing about sport is that we have to pretend it’s serious. And if we make the admission that it isn’t, it becomes pointless.

The history of sport is supposed to look like serious history: such matters as the Ashes, the men’s singles at Wimbledon and the England football team have a resonance because of their history. The present Wimbledon is alight with the prospect that Roger Federer could beat Bjorn Borg’s record of five successive men’s singles titles.

But what if we decided that there was something amiss with that last final that Borg won? What if we decided that after John McEnroe had won the greatest tie-break in history, he should have gone on to win the match? Then not only would Federer’s march on history suddenly become irrelevant, so would just about everything else in tennis as well.

History is full of injustices, errors, things that could have been done better, things that can never be put right. That is what history means, as Stephen muses as he teaches history to his pupils at school.

And sport has its resonance with us because it mimics history. It mimics the affairs of men and women, that is why it acts as a thrilling metaphor for all the passions and purposes of human life. If we go back and start putting right all the wrong things that have happened, we are saying that, since sport is amenable to this kind of alteration, it isn’t really history. In short, it isn’t really real. And as soon as we see through sport, sport loses its value for us.

The ICC has shattered the illusion on which sport is built. Perhaps it should go back and change it.