It's the hunting season again. Ganguly's the fox and the hacks who follow the touring cricketers about are riding to hounds. It's becoming a habit. When Waugh's Australians visited earlier this year, print and broadcast journalists in the touring party, notably Ian Chappell and Malcolm Conn, became fixated on Ganguly and his wickedness. This time round Nasser Hussain has been cast in the role Steve Waugh essayed earlier: Leader of Men. You have to have someone playing the archetypal Leader of Men if Ganguly's inadequacies are to be properly highlighted. One English journalist wrote that given Ganguly's record of indiscipline, he was qualified to lead a brat pack, not men. Another, Michael Henderson of the Telegraph, cited Ganguly's seven punishments and asked with ponderous irony: 'Some leader of men, eh?' The first thing to notice is how grown men go on about 'leaders of men' without self-consciousness or embarrassment. The English are peculiarly susceptible to this Boys Own Paper idiom because the English in general and English cricket journalists in particular have a head-boy view of hierarchy. Nasser Hussain by general acclamation is a Leader of Men. The reason he makes a good head boy while Ganguly doesn't is because Hussain understands that authority is handed down from above. Speaking to Derek Pringle about the Denness affair, Hussain said: 'The way the world works is that you have your bosses and your guv'nors who run things and the ICC runs cricket. The sooner everyone realizes that the ICC runs the game as it should be run, the better. The two gentlemen who are running the ICC are doing a fine job. Everyone must understand who is running the show and everyone should adhere to what the governing body says.' Lord Maclaurin couldn't have put the case for the headmaster better. And if Hussain tugged his forelock any harder, he'd yank his hair out. Within this sad, twilit, deferential world, populated by guv'nors (!), bosses, headboys and fags, obedience is a kind of religion. The decisions of constituted authority demand complete submission. The thing to remember is that this cult of obedience isn't characteristic of English journalism in general; it's only cricket writers that worship in this Victorian way at the altar of authority. Theirs not to reason why. A week ago, Stephen Brenkley of the Independent defended the ICC rule that disallowed appeals against the match referee's decisions because the right to appeal might let lawyers into the game. (His piece is such a perfect instance of the English cricket hack leaping to uphold the sacred right of the powers-that-be to cock-up unchallenged, that it needs to be quoted at length.) 'The case of Arjuna Ranatunga,' he writes, 'taught cricket that harsh lesson. Ranatunga infamously led his players to the edge of the pitch after Muttiah Mura-litharan was called (wrongly) for throwing in a one-day international between Sri Lanka and England in Adelaide in 1999. The match was eventually restarted but was played in a spirit of outright acrimony. When the match referee, Peter van der Merwe, tried to impose punishments the Sri Lankans brought in the lawyers. The upshot was that only superficial penalties were imposed. That was a bad day for the game.' For Brenkley, the fact that Muralitharan was wrongly called for throwing by an umpire (which would have unfairly ended a great career) isn't infamous; it is the Sri Lankan captain's spirited defence of his bowler that is. Brenkley is disappointed that the Sri Lankan players couldn't be punished by the match referee for protesting against a dreadful piece of umpiring. Neither in this passage nor in the rest of his article does Brenkley address the real issue, which is, how do you deal with bad or incompetent umpiring? And he forgets to mention that the umpire who called Muralitharan for throwing on that occasion had been temporarily suspended from his day job because his employers thought that he was too stressed-out to cope. Brenkley isn't calling for the head of the person who appointed an unfit umpire or demanding that professional umpires be penalized for incompetence; no, he's worried that Ranatunga and his men got off without being caned. It should come as no surprise that his piece is called, 'At long last the game gets a governor!' It would be funny if it weren't so sad. It's important not to mistake hacks like Henderson and Brenkley for reporters. They're a low form of ideologue, leader writers who never made it to the edit pages. Reporters base their opinions on what they've seen; ideologues guard secondhand opinions against the corruption of experience or evidence. Henderson, for example, was eloquent about the manifest guilt of the punished Indian players at Port Elizabeth when the controversy first broke. Then, just before the first test began in Mohali, he wrote, 'India lost in South Africa and, in losing, and no matter what people have said here on their behalf, their players behaved poorly.' How would he know? In between his condemnations of Indian conduct, he appeared on a television show on Star News, and blithely announced that he hadn't actually seen the match in question or even video clips of the incidents that provoked Denness 's punishments. Days after the controversy broke, a controversy that threatened to split the cricket-playing world, the Daily Telegraph's cricket correspondent turns up on prime time, taking sides on the issue without taking the trouble to look at what actually happened on the playing field. In a remarkable article written on the eve of the first test, Henderson resumed his role as Master of the Hunt. Ganguly was his quarry and the whole article read like an obscure ritual of denunciation. He told his readers that Ganguly was known to Australian cricketers as the Bengali Boor and also Lord Snooty. Then Henderson warmed to his task and had an anonymous Australian player say that Ganguly was 'the biggest shit I've ever come across in the game'. Then, really getting into his stride, Henderson attributes to several players collectively the bizarre view that 'Ganguly is really a 'tart''. These are clearly the words that Henderson would himself use to describe Ganguly though he's careful to fire his guns off the shoulders of anonymous informants. Craven is a word Henderson uses for Ganguly in one of his many denunciations - putting abuse into inverted commas seems a pretty craven thing to do. What should worry Henderson's readers is not the rudeness of 'tart' or 'shit', but the hysteria that they symptomize. To join a cult is to purge yourself of individual sense to share in collective hysteria. So it is with the Cult of Obedience and Deference of which the Brenkleys and Hendersons are paid-up life members. mukulkesavan@hotmail.com