A good day to bury bad news

While all eyes were on the Oval this afternoon, the ECB saw it as a good moment to slip out a press release about Dominic Cork receiving a one-match suspended ban and a £1,500 fine (plus £1,000 costs) for swearing at a doping officer after the C&G Trophy final last month. Line and Length sees it as its duty that this story should not go unremarked.

Cork, you will recall, had batted for an hour and a half at Lord's, making 35 not out, in a valiant attempt to resurrect Lancashire's chase of a small Sussex total. When the last Lancashire wicket fell, and Sussex had won by 15 runs, Cork was understandably a bit emotional and not all that interested in urinating into a bottle.

I don't know how impolitely Cork told the doping officer that he wouldn't undergo the test, or where he told him to put his bottle, but surely a bit of leniency could have been observed. Cork's action will have been done in private and will not have brought the game into disrepute (I wasn't even aware that there had been a row until today). The ECB disciplinary panel was upset that no one in the Lancashire dressing-room had tried to defuse the situation. Can you blame them?

Comments

[Patrick Kidd]

Alex,
Those are valid points. Of course, abuse of anyone (officials, members of the public, etc) should not go unpunished.

But at the same time, officials should understand that there are good and bad times to pursue their bureaucracy. I do not feel that going into the dressing-room of a side that has just narrowly lost a cup final they should have won and asking the man who nearly won the game for them for a urine sample was wise, fair or respectful to Lancashire.

I am not excusing Cork, or suggesting that the punishment was over the top, but I feel that there was no need for a doping officer to be in the Lancashire dressing-room after the game. If tests needed to be taken, player(s) could be required to show up in a separate room at Lord's a couple of hours after the match.

Cricket barely has a drugs problem, I feel that officials should not treat players like spoilt children by assuming that they need immediate testing. Of course, Cork acting like a spoilt child doesn't help that argument...
Patrick

[Alex]

According to the BBC (no sweeping it under the carpet there), "A three-man ECB disciplinary panel accepted Cork was in an emotional state but had belittled the official in the presence of his Lancashire team-mates".

So, it wasn't done in private; in fact it sounds as if Cork was indulging in a bit of machoism (well, there's a first time for everything, isn't there!) and has quite rightly paid the price.

The doping officer is only doing his job, and shouldn't have to put up with abuse while doing so.

And consider this: do you really want to create a situation where it's possible for drug cheats to evade detection by abusing the doping officer and attracting nothing more than a pittance of a fine and a measly one-match ban? I'm not for a moment suggesing that that's what Cork was doing, but if he was allowed to get away with it, even though innocent, it would create a loophole for the guilty also.