Reaction to International Cricket Council match referee Mike Denness' actions in fining Indian players and applying suspensions and suspended sentences for various misdemeanours in South Africa has been way over the top.

Admittedly India is incensed that Sachin Tendulkar has been fingered, if you will pardon the pun, but really!

At the last meeting of ICC bigwigs in Kuala Lumpur, the news went out that the face of cricket was going to change with a much stronger stance on misbehaviour and acts against the spirit of the game.

It was only a matter of time before the big stick was wielded.

The Indian players must surely have heard the news.

Or perhaps players don't read the newspapers after all.

But ignorance of the facts has never been a defence, and nor is it in this case.

It is naive in the extreme to expect that simply because a player is ranked so highly by not only his own supporters, but all cricket lovers in the world, that he can be excepted from guilt in the matter of suspicion of ball tampering.

Just as naive is the belief that India can demand the replacement of a match referee.

That goes against the entire process of introducing the match referee in the first place. The tail (member countries) no longer wag the dog (the ICC) in cricket administration.

For the good of the game overall, power has been collected in the game's world body and that is where the matter ends.

Unpalatable as the action of Denness has been to many observers across India, something that is immediately apparent by the depth of reaction, the fact remains that Denness saw suspicion enough to act before receiving any report from the match umpires.

The truth be known, the umpires don't have to come into the matter. Denness is doing precisely what he was required to do under the ICC's requirements of match referees. He saw something in the television coverage that no umpire could ever hope to see on the field of play and he acted upon it.

It's not the first time it has happened as New Zealand match referee John Reid acted in exactly the same situation in Sri Lanka when he pinged Pakistan's Waqar Younis for ball tampering, and got exactly the same response from Waqar's home board.

The difference is now that the match referees have been given even more power to act and the response of countries affected doesn't matter one iota.

If Tendulkar was wanting to clean the ball and remove dirt from the seam his obvious, and only, course was to hand the ball to the umpire and ask him to do the deed.

Do players not think about obvious matters like this?

Officialdom is determined to clean up the game and there can be no better example than what happened in South Africa that things have changed.

At the moment it is India that is under the spotlight, but tomorrow it may well be Australia, or New Zealand, or when their time comes England or Zimbabwe or Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka or the West Indies.

No team can hide. All teams can expect to suffer the consequences.

The test for the ICC is to ensure that all its match referees are united in their stance. And that surely is the benefit to emerge from having a select pool of match referees to control the continuity required to sufficiently police the game.

The moves by Denness in South Africa may be unpalatable for the moment, but they are the clearest sign yet that times have changed and a cleaner game is going to emerge from all the controversy.

© CricInfo