Pitched battle
The Guardian, Comment is free
10 January
In the angry contentions gripping world cricket following the Sydney Test between India and Australia, a number of disparate issues have become intertwined. To find a way through the thicket of questions raised by the imbroglio, it’s necessary to disentangle them. It’s also necessary to get beyond the reduction of the whole thing to a battle between the Asian bloc and its rivals.
To begin with, there was the incompetence of the umpiring, which has led to Steve Bucknor’s removal from the next Test. So egregious were the errors at Sydney, and so significant in affecting the course of the Test, that it would have been absurd to pretend that no change was necessary. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) was right to lobby for Bucknor’s removal: its players had lost confidence in him, and proceeding with the contest under such conditions becomes impossible for all concerned. Whether or not the BCCI lobbied for it, the move was in the interests of cricket fans in general. I doubt very much whether any neutral wants to see Bucknor or Mark Benson standing in another match just now.
Then there was the conduct of the Australians, which outraged Indian captain Anil Kumble, who claimed that his opponents had breached a pre-match agreement about only claiming catches that were genuine. That agreement was a welcome development, and to my eye, at least, the Australians seemed to violate it. In addition, Brad Hogg has now been charged with abusive behaviour. Many in Australia see this as a cynical concession to the Asian bloc, a quid pro quo for the charge against Harbhajan Singh, but others would say that the Australian players have a dreadful record of double-standards when it comes to on-field behaviour, that their sledging is not always innocent and their appealing cynical.
In an earlier article I argued that the Indian response to the Harbhajan affair betrayed an ingrained refusal to address frankly the reality of racism in Indian society. Many friends have responded, and while accepting what I say about racism in Indian society, argue that Harbhajan himself is innocent, that the Australians have manufactured this charge, and that Mike Procter has no credibility in adjudicating the issue.
Harbhajan is entitled to due process and a rigorous examination of the evidence, so it is right that his suspension has been suspended, and that a larger and more deliberative process will now ensue. Again, the postponement of final judgment has been attributed to pressure from the Asian bloc. In this case, that happens to have coincided with the just and necessary course of action. The last word on this could not lie with Proctor.
In the absence of corroborative evidence on either side, it does become one person’s word against another’s. That always leaves an element of doubt. However, it cannot preclude finding in favour of one person or the other, as courts of law do frequently, taking into account contextual evidence and the respective credibility of the statements made by the individuals involved. It’s not good enough to say: Symonds can’t prove it, so that’s the end of the matter. If that were so, it would be to licence racist abuse in any one-on-one situation.
Have the Australians manufactured the racism charge? It’s the sort of thing the Australian media and Australian politicians would do all too readily, but I’m not sure Ponting’s team had much to gain in this case. Against the conspiracy theory has to be set a possible and plausible scenario: that Harbhajan did call Symonds a “monkey” and that Symonds and/or his team-mates were sufficiently affronted by this that they felt they had to make a complaint.
It was a long struggle to get the cricket authorities to recognise the seriousness of racism, on and off the field. Even now, it’s a topic about which they get very skittish, and cricketers on the whole remain reluctant to make incidents public. The history of the game is mostly one of grin-and-bear-it. So when a player steps forward with a charge such as the one the Australian team has made, it has to be taken seriously. Not taken entirely on trust, but also not dismissed summarily. As I argued previously, racism thrives in Indian society, and it would be unrealistic to expect all Indian cricketers to be immune from it. The BCCI seems to be arguing that no Indian cricketer could be guilty of such behaviour, and that is both implausible and dangerous.
On the other hand, the notion that this whole chain of events is about the Asian bloc exercising its muscle is myopic. The issues of on field justice – in the umpiring and in the conduct of players – are not the property of any regional bloc. The otherwise fascinating Sydney Test was ruined, for everyone, by the umpiring and the nastiness. To the extent that the BCCI lobby for better umpiring and better conduct by players, they will or should have the support of cricket fans everywhere.
The growing clout of the so-called Asian bloc (in reality, an India-centred and not entirely reliable bloc) is much resented, and sometimes wildly exaggerated. After all, the bulk of the global cricket apparatus is still in the hands of their Anglo-Australian rivals, and they all sway to the tune of Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp dominates cricket broadcasting on several continents. Some 90% of the world’s cricket fans live in South Asia and it is only natural and democratic that their cricket boards wield power in the international game. In fact, an indictment of the BCCI and other South Asian boards is that, preoccupied with their own privileges and ambitions, they have failed to translate demographic superiority into meaningful influence. When the BCCI barks at the ICC, it generally gets a good press at home, in sharp contrast to the Indian media’s usual derogatory treatment of cricket administrators – viewed as corrupt and incompetent.
