A farce is being played out at Centurion Park today: the Test sides of South Africa and India are playing a match that counts for nothing. The only scores that matter now are those being settled in the committee rooms. This must rank as one of the saddest days in Test history. The tragedy is that this could have been easily avoided. What started with a gross mistake has been blown into a full-fledged catastrophe and there is hardly a soul involved in this sordid drama who can escape culpability.

It's a classic case of one folly leading to another, with each worse than the previous one. Sachin Tendulkar made the first mistake, in law, if not in spirit. He wasn't entitled to clean the seam of the ball on his own - unless Mike Denness has seen something that we haven't, it is unfair to assume that he did anything but clean the seam, so the most he deserved was a mild rebuke. That would have been the sensible course of action.

Umpires are duty-bound to inspect the ball at regular intervals and are obliged to award five penalty runs to the batting side if they find evidence of ball-tampering. Clearly, this wasn't the case at Port Elizabeth, and the match referee's decision to penalise Tendulkar was whimsical, not to say harsh. To the ever-so-sensitive Indian cricket-lover, it was a gross miscarriage of justice, or, worse, deliberate vindictiveness.

But if Denness was overzealous in Tendulkar's case, he was outrageous in handing out a suspended sentence to nearly half the Indian side and a ban to Virender Sehwag for excessive appealing. It was justice gone loony. But so obsessed are we as a nation with Tendulkar that the only talking point of the day was the humiliation of our national icon.

The match referee had clearly stepped out of line. But the Indian reaction to his decision was equally out of place. Given the cult status cricket enjoys here, indignation was understandable, but to give this the status of a national calamity is over the top.

The situation was tailor-made for Jagmohan Dalmiya - whose lust for power is directly proportionate to his loathing of ICC, a body which he headed not so long ago - to grab the controls and steer the events to a point-of-no-return.

The ICC is guilty of many misdeeds, including the ad-hoc manner in which it appoints match referees. But it can't be faulted for downgrading this match. Dalmiya bullied the South African board to toe his line and forced even a toothless body like ICC to take a position.

He has scored his point, but, alas, cricket has been hit for six.

Sambit Bal is India editor of Wisden.com.

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