MICHAEL HOLDING, the former West Indies fast bowler, lent his support to Inzamam-ul-Haq, saying that Darrell Hair was "insensitive" to have penalised Pakistan for ball-tampering.

"I have absolute and all sympathy with Inzamam-ul Haq. If you label someone a cheat, please arrive with the evidence," Holding wrote in India Today, a leading weekly news magazine.

Holding felt that most umpires would have said something to the fielding captain and given the offending team a warning of some kind

"Then if the tampering continued, they would have been totally justified in taking action. There is a double standard at work in cricket and this episode has only highlighted it.

"When England used reverse-swing to beat the Australians in the 2005 Ashes, everyone said it was great skill. When Pakistan do it, the opposite happens, no one thinks it is great skill. Everyone associates it with skullduggery.

"When bombs go off in Karachi and Colombo everyone wants to go home. When bombs go off in London, no one says anything. That is First World hypocrisy and we have to live with it."

Holding said that seeing the cricketing law as the absolute and final truth was pointless. Every law, he wrote, has room for flexibility. (PS)