From Wisden Editor's article.......

[Rajan]

The annual overview of world cricket Notes by the Editor Scyld Berry 2009 There but for the grace Cricket needs to record with gratitude the name of Reg Dickason, the security officer who advised against the Champions Trophy going ahead in Pakistan last September. According to the original schedule, England, and probably South Africa and New Zealand, would have been staying at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad when a lorry, driven by a suicide bomber and packed with explosives, drew up at the hotel gates. In addition to missing out on staging the Champions Trophy, Pakistan did not play a single Test in 2008. They played a "home" one-day series against West Indies at the splendid modern stadium in Abu Dhabi, but a neutral venue is no substitute for generating public interest and revenue. The ECB made a pitch for hosting some of Pakistan's matches in England, but that was not a worthy suggestion. We should try to help Pakistan bind itself together and make it work properly, not carve it up. The terrorists who attacked Mumbai on November 26 were reported to be from Pakistan. One of their main targets was the Taj Mahal Hotel, beside the Gateway of India. If anywhere in the world could have been called "the cricket hotel", it was the Taj. Two South African security officers, who had arrived to protect officials drawing up regulations for the new Champions League, organised a large part of the defence of the Taj from within. Faisul Nagel, an England security officer on more than one tour, and Bob Nicholls should be remembered for helping to save approximately 150 lives. If a terrorist attack can have a silver lining, it was that the Indian board and the ECB came closer together. Not alone, I took angry exception to the IPL chief commissioner Lalit Modi proclaiming that England's Test series in India would go ahead while the siege of the Taj was still going on. A far better statement of propriety and human decency came simultaneously from India's captain, the highly impressive Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who said: "We are entertainers, and now is not the time to entertain." It was obvious that Modi's prime concern was to ensure that the second IPL went ahead. Ideally, England would not have gone back to India so quickly: playing 12 days after the Mumbai attacks must have been insensitively soon for some of the bereaved. By then it was also apparent that India's tour of Pakistan would be cancelled, and most of January would have been free for both countries. But better that the tour went ahead when it did than not at all. And, in the aftermath, the English and Indian boards realised that what united them was greater than what divided them, especially in a major economic crisis. During this recession, the failures of western-style capitalism were widely discussed; and it was tempting to hope that cricket's administrators would reassess their values too. Balance should be the objective, as Jayawardene said: the best not the biggest, the most watchable not the most lucrative, the optimum amount of cricket not the maximum. The professional game, too, had to learn that the pursuit of short-term profit had brought the world of barely regulated capitalism to disaster's brink. http://content.cricinfo.com/wisdenalmanack/content/story/398700.html =========================================== some how i supported Reg Dickason even before the Lahore attack and defended his reports, on the other side!