Provided Steve Bucknor is allowed the dignified retirement he wants and deserves, at a time of his own choosing, the frequently villified ICC may be said to have come rather well out of the affair of Harbhajan Singh and Andrew Symonds. I am not sure that the same is true of the BCCI, whose muscles were flexed somewhat indecently throughout.

One understands, of course, the particular sensitivity of matters pertaining to race, but either the BCCI, like all other national representative bodies, accepts the rules of the ICC and, in this case, the procedures that everyone has agreed, whatever the outcome, or there is potential anarchy.

The row that erupted at Sydney when some of the Australian players accused Harbhajan of calling Symonds a 'monkey' was only a crisis so long as the BCCI chose to make it so. Heated talk of calling the tour off, either after the initial verdict by the referee, Mike Procter, or after the appeal in Adelaide, was very unwise and it leaves in the air the question of whether the team might still have been called home if the original accusation against Harbhajan had been upheld by the High Court judge.

Happily, it was not and we shall hear tomorrow precisely why, but presumably it is because the original verdict was made on the evidence of one man's word against others. The basis of all justice is that an accusation has to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. The important point is that there is a system that allows appeals like this. As when Inzamam-ul-Haq appealed successfully after the forefeited Oval Test in 2006, national pride was satisfied, in that case because the suggestion of deliberate cheating was rejected.

But it would not be a good thing if it were to become the expected outcome of every appeal that, whenever a nation's pride is ruffled, oil will be poured on troubled waters. Every case has to be judged on its merits. Umpires have to be sure that, if serious abuses of the game occur, especially if they relate to its spirit, they should not be in danger of losing the support of their employers if the media reaction gets too hot for comfort.

Sledging is not part of cricket: it is an abuse that developed first in Australia and South Africa, spread like a plague and needed to be checked. It is expressly against the laws. It was a very satisfactory side-effect of the rumpus at the SCG that everyone was playing the game without sneering or snide behaviour at Perth and Adelaide. The resting of Bucknor was, on balance, sensible but again, it is important that it was ordained to calm things down and definitely not in response to a feeling by India that he had made too many decisions against them.

This will not be the last of incidents like this, although every player has been reminded that racial comments are beyond the pale, however innocently they might have been expressed. I feel sorry up to a point for contemporary professionals, be they umpires or players, because television exposes everything in such fine detail. The game was never played by 22 saints and no sinners. But it is because they play in a gold-fish bowl that they have to be so careful now, and that there has to be a legal framework in place.